


what is the heart but a haunting

by velvetcrowbars



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Extremely Extraneous Details on the Horrors of War, Felix and his very complicated relationship with Guilt, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route, Ghosts, Gore, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Relationship Study, please see a/n for cw!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:01:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21981808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velvetcrowbars/pseuds/velvetcrowbars
Summary: Felix has brushed death before: with the back of his knuckles, with the tips of his fingers. There’ve been many close calls, some of them closer than others. Felix has had lances in his belly, arrows buried in the meat of his thighs, poison-dipped knives swung near his neck. Yet none of them—not a single one—compares to how it feels when the next word is ripped out of his mouth through his teeth, a whisper gritted down to nothing but air when he shivers.“…Dimitri?”In a world where Byleth chose the Alliance, Felix sees Dimitri's ghost.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 15
Kudos: 134





	what is the heart but a haunting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> well...this has been a long time coming. hello! this fic dedicated to rib (for putting up w/ my incessant talking/building of this fic over the past month and a half. and many other great things. merry late chrimble <3)
> 
> this fic gets quite dark and heavy at time and i thought it might be better to write out content warnings as opposed to tagging them (mostly bc i'm a chronic not-tag reader myself). so! content warnings for:
> 
> -graphic depictions of violence   
> -major character death  
> -slight body horror  
> -graphic depiction of a dead body (if you'd like to skip this, stop reading at the paragraph that begins "There was very little" and start reading again at the paragraph starting with "So reads the report" in the second section.)  
> -emetophobia  
> -disordered eating  
> -referenced (but no explicit) animal abuse  
> -mild sexual content  
> -not dubcon, but consent is a very wobbly line in the particular scene from above due to Intimacy Issues and Baggage. also sex as an unhealthy coping mechanism.  
> -descriptions of decapitation  
> -references to drowning (not explicit)
> 
> be safe everyone!

_“Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.”_

-David Mitchell

Hilda brings the news back but an hour after Felix awakens from a Recovery-induced sleep on the floor of Mercedes’s tent. 

He watches her corner Sylvain in a low voice from across the aisles of the Alliance’s exhausted forces as they drag themselves back in, battered and hemorrhaging from the field. The grass here is dead from their trampling, the sky an undulating gray mass of cloud high above them, moving fast.

Hilda’s yet to remove her armor, bright hair half-matted down in blood-woven mud, the left side of her pauldron cracked and sliding down her arm. Beneath it, he’d bet good coin there’s an arrowhead still buried in the flesh of her collarbone. Felix smells the stink of the wyverns nearby. The eastward breeze off the fields of Bergliez are strong at dusk. That, at least, is one small mercy they can count on their side.

Sylvain’s still receiving care for his wounds: a gash splitting the muscle of his right shoulder clean through, a cracked rib, a scrape still dripping red on the down curve of his jaw. It will scar, surely. Another addition to the collection of starburst white slices littering his throat, like little comets carved under his skin.

Felix, for his own part, managed to escape with just a lance slash near his hipbone and a Thoron spell kickback through his left arm. It bruises clean and red in the spindly path of his veins, from pinky to elbow. It was his own fault. Not enough concentration pooled around the tips of his fingers before he cast it, too caught up in the roar and the heat, the balls of fire falling on them like hail direct from the depths of the eternal flame. Threading a spell through friend and foe to strike at the knight aiming for Lysithea’s turned shoulder may have been a gross miscalculation of his own abilities. He’d been careless. 

They’ve seen worse. They’ve both lived through worse. 

He peers at Sylvain and Hilda through the murky smoke and dust. Sylvain can’t see Felix from here, but Felix can see him. It’s an ideal spot. Hilda has her back to him, and can’t get more than a few sentences out before Sylvain pries the healer’s hands off the dome of his shoulders and pulls her into the medical tent. 

Felix nurses the water skin Leonie’d brought him on her way through to the weapons stockade, resuming his slow pace outside the Kingdom horses’ picket line. The result of his sudden movement and venture outside is a dripping mess of blood and bile on the backside of the barns. He always forgets how Recovery is like a small child bottling your organs and shaking, _hard_ , to smooth out the imperfections and internal damage. Even now his nose and throat feel raw, his dizziness in the spell’s wake like a lingering headache. He takes small sips, having learnt his lesson, and swallows a little more down with each repetitive motion. Water skin to mouth. Swirl it under his tongue for a few moments. Swallow. Repeat. 

It is an agonizing length of time before Sylvain ducks back into view, a limp in his step. Felix’s spine straightens, a snap to attention so quick it sends his battle-wrenched muscles twinging in protest. It doesn’t take long for Felix to notice Hilda isn’t following him out.

Sylvain’s breastplate is gone, along with any of his armor from the waist up, likely already being toted down to the blacksmith for repairs. All it leaves him in is the grimy double layers he’d been wearing on the final days of the march here, the linen wrinkled with body heat and humidity. There’s an old blood stain faded to rosy pink around the collar. Felix thinks of pulling the fabric up over Sylvain’s head, biting a kiss into the left side of his chest just to feel his heartbeat in his teeth. It’s the kind of affirmation Felix craves after a long fight, that they are still here, mostly-whole and breathing.

A little emboldened at the thought, Felix takes a long swig of water and feels it curdle all the way down as it sloshes into his stomach. Sylvain looks up, straight and high into the sky. Had it been any earlier in the afternoon, he’d be staring into the sun.

The rain had begun so early the previous morning that by the time they’d set out to battle the field was one glorious, sloshed up mud pit. It’ll take weeks, months to properly scrub the bloodied dirt out of their clothes. The sun’s only just now beginning to show its face, a hazy orb through the wall of dirty gray clouds still covering the sky. Sylvain’s squinting, as if straining to catch a glimpse of something flying behind the veil.

Felix doesn’t know why this, in particular, is what infuriates him more than anything.

He’s about to begin his trudge across the tent aisles when Sylvain’s gaze nosedives down, eyes screwed shut like it hurts. His legs fold and he’s sitting back on his heels in the middle of the army camp bustle, breathing long and jagged against his kneecaps. His hands cup and press around his nose, and to anyone else it might look as if he’s praying, forehead scrunched in concentration and agonizing, endless faith. Felix recognizes no one in the stream of soldiers and mages and riders busying about them. Felix is the only one here who knows Sylvain is not a holy man.

A scream echoes from the south edge of camp. Something has happened. Felix realizes quickly he doesn’t want to know what it is. 

Another cry sounds in their periphery, closer this time. A wail that crescendos, rises and falls, breaks over itself in a choke. Felix watches Sylvain lift his head, stricken and pale. He follows his gaze as the last intake of cavalrymen off the northern front line are carted in. He’d caught wind of it early on in the fight—a blast of liquid fire straight from the Emperor’s right hand had scythed that section of the field into nothing but churned, scorched dirt, a whole half of the division sliced to ribbons of stiff, burnt bone in a matter of moments.

These must be the leftovers. The ones left behind.

A scream comes from somewhere in the cart’s recesses, and there are no recognizable words, only the noise, a broken spell misfiring over and over again until it eventually sputters out to nothing but a whimper.

Felix had always thought Hubert von Vestra was a rotten bastard. At least now he knows for sure. 

The procession is a hurried one. Through the cart wheels and flood of healers pouring out their tents to gather and move any of those left unconscious, Felix sees a flash of ginger as Sylvain stands, scrubs a hand over his face. His gait still has a lurch as he moves to get out of the way, weaving in and out until he’s in Felix’s full view again, blood-caked fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. There’re still a few rows of people and tents between them, but Sylvain looks up and finds Felix’s eyes in an instant through the chaos, and Felix knows there was never a moment Sylvain hadn’t known he was standing there all along. 

Something cold, hard and pointed clunks down to the bottom of Felix’s gut. Sylvain’s hand falls back to his side, swinging as he lets it hang limp. His face is a blank slate, waiting for someone to fill in the lines. It is a game Felix has never been particularly good at. He watches a sigh heave from Sylvain’s chest, feels it tug at the invisible tether connected to his own, like a weighted anchor between them. Felix lets it pull him in, ambling over until the toes of their boots almost touch. He has to crane his neck back a painful degree to look Sylvain in the face, but it’s worth it to see the life still buried and secure in the distant brown of his eyes.

“What’s happened,” Felix says. It is not a question, because those are dangerous to use in Sylvain’s presence. There’s too much margin for deflection, for drawing lines around what they can and cannot say.

Sylvain opens his mouth, closes it around the breath. The clench of his jaw is a strong, hard crease across his cheek.

Felix squints at him. “Speechless, are we? That’s rare.” 

“No,” Sylvain manages, just an utterance, soft and thick in the back of his throat. “That isn’t it. Felix, there’s—”

He loses momentum, voice trailing off to nothing, and the way he can’t stop searching for something in Felix’s eyes, like they might hold the answer to his question, makes the cold, pointed thing in Felix’s stomach come barreling up through his chest. 

“Sylvain,” he half-whispers, and it comes out a warning. “What are you hiding?”

“This isn’t about me, just—let’s go…somewhere else.”

“Where, then?” Suspicion creeps into the corners of his voice.

“Anywhere. Just not...here.” Sylvain casts his gaze about, the words a hollow echo when they hit Felix square in the chest. 

He feels like the air’s turned to needles. “Fine.” 

Felix turns on his heel and does not check to see if Sylvain follows. He wants to walk as far as his aching legs will carry him, out past the officers’ tents and guard outposts, into the clusters of straggly elm trees edging the valley to where no one will hear the frustration grinding his teeth down to nothing. But he knows he shouldn’t go far—Sylvain is more than just another sword to stick in the Empire’s underbelly, much unlike himself. Sylvain is important, his voice at the war table a valuable addition Felix knows Claude requires. Soon, someone will come looking for them. They don’t have much time.

“Felix!” he hears Sylvain call. He doesn’t slow, doesn’t so much as turn his head to look. “Felix, slow _down_.”

“No.” 

“Felix, I have a—a dislocated _kneecap_ I can’t _walk_ that fast. Just—”

That gets Felix to stop. He glances back to see Sylvain wilting heavy onto his right side, and the glare that fits to Felix’s mouth is perfunctory, a compulsion he can’t help. Sylvain’s panting, hand covering the whole of his face once more. A fluttering of something close to panic comes dangerously close to Felix’s lungs.

With measured steps, Felix marches back and butts his head under Sylvain’s elbow without a word. It takes Sylvain a moment to put the pieces together, to let the weight of his arm fall across Felix’s shoulders with a tentative grimace. Felix takes care not to touch beneath his right shoulder blade—even if the healers close the skin around injuries like that, the site stays stinging and oozing for months. He knows from experience.

Their progress forward is stunted and slow. He lets Sylvain take the lead, veering south past the covered, makeshift corrals for the pegasus knights and row upon row of their elaborate, complicated tack. In the far distance behind them, the ballista and trebuchets rumble, their operators clamoring over them in marked dexterity. Their outlines sit like the great wooden framework of skeletal beasts through the smoke pluming off the ironworks beyond. 

Felix knows Sylvain’s leading them to their personal quarters. He calls it _theirs_ only because while Sylvain has an allocation of canvas tent and provisions to himself, he hardly spends more time there than absolutely necessary. Felix hasn’t spent a night alone in more moons than he cares to count. It suits him fine, more often than not. Under any other circumstances, Felix allowing Sylvain to lean on his shoulder is something Sylvain would never let him get away with without a sufficient ribbing. The fact he remains so stoic now, of all times, isn’t reassuring.

They duck through Felix’s tent flap with a bit of difficulty. The sweaty curl of Sylvain’s hair catches on the clasps meant to hold the entrance closed, and Felix spends longer than necessary to untangle them without ripping at his scalp. 

“Are you going to tell me now?” he mutters, furious against Sylvain’s forehead. “Or am I going to have to leave you here until you confess?”

Sylvain laughs, but it may as well not have come from him at all. “That would be cruel, even for you.”

“Maybe you deserve it,” he says, without any heat. He manages to break through the matted clump of dried blood caught on the clasp, combing the new, wild toss of Sylvain’s hair till it lays down smoother against his head.

Perhaps Sylvain’s set-mouth silence should’ve been the first warning sign. Perhaps, if the remnants of Mercedes’s spell weren’t clinging to Felix’s limbs in humming heat, if he’d try to hold his gaze on Sylvain’s face a little longer, he’d be able to know, before the other shoe dropped. But he doesn’t. Felix draws away, turns around to shed one of his sweat-chilled shirts to the floor. 

“Maybe.” Sylvain says, shrugging. A shiver crawls over Felix’s skin again. The dread that had been dripping, pooling slowly in his chest, floods over in a single, painful rush.

“You’re not supposed to agree with me, idiot.”

Sylvain stays quiet as he takes his first hobbling steps inside. Felix keeps his back turned as he fumbles with his buttons, but listens with a careful ear as Sylvain lumbers about, managing eventually to dip his hand in the day-old water basin kept near their sleep rolls. He cups the water up to hold in his palms, splashes it over his face, scrubs at the back of his neck. Felix turns just his head to watch him, feeling as if they aren’t in the same room, as if they’re standing nations, worlds apart. 

“So,” he forces the sound out through his lips. “Spit it out, then.” 

Sylvain’s face is bent down, eyes closed. His brows furrow at the words, his hand still rubbing at his nape. The way he bites down against the pink of his lower lip pales it white with strain. 

“Fine then. Let me guess.” Felix goads, his overshirt a damp crumple he kneads between his fingers. “Did Dorothea reject your proposal again?”

Sylvain’s eyes open. His lips part, blinking like a doe caught in the sights of a hunter’s bow. Felix realizes just how haggard he looks, like he’s aged six years in the six hours since they’ve seen each other. He looks as if Felix has just slapped him full across the face. It’s a sure sign, if nothing else was before, that Felix should rein in the foul-mouthed creature living behind his tongue. 

He keeps going. 

“Or have you moved onto someone else now that she won’t pay you the kind of attention you want? Are you set to chase after Hilda now? Is that it?” 

“Do you really—?” Sylvain’s hands fall slack into his lap. “You think this is about… _women?_ ”

“Isn’t that what it’s always about with you?”

 _“_ You really think after what I said—no. What I _did_ that I’d really—?”

He wants to wrench Sylvain’s face between his hands, hold him there and claw the answers out of his mouth. _What the hell am I supposed to think, then?_ he doesn’t say. Felix looks everywhere but the space Sylvain occupies, determined not to break under the pressure crackling between them. Black ice is all too easy to fall through when you cannot see the cracks.

“How am I supposed to know anything if you won’t talk to me? You’re always prattling on about how I need to communicate with you more, how I need to _tell_ you things but look at you, this is deplorable, it’s—” 

“He’s dead, Felix.”

Neither of them move. Sylvain’s voice is a carefully molded sound, clear and absolute. It leaves no room for refutation, even as it breaks at the end, crumbling in on itself. The ice gives way, and Felix is plunging down, the frozen water breaking through his lungs, coating his skin before he has time to grab the edge and pull himself back up. Sylvain’s mouth moves, Felix’s name a muffled echo so far below the surface.

“He’s dead, Felix.” The words curl up between them, like a mad beast settling down to sleep. “Dimitri is dead.”

☾

Felix begins seeing Dimitri’s ghost long before he dies in the far and foreign reaches of Gronder Field.

Long before they know him to be dead, stuck and hollowed in the field that had once won the Kingdom their independence from Adrestia. A monumental, historic feat, by all accounts. An accomplishment their beast of a crown prince manages to undo in a matter of hours as he bleeds himself dry into the soil. 

There was very little to be recovered, both from the surrounding forest and his body. The Imperial soldiers had stripped him of all visible weaponry, including house Blaiddyd’s relic. Any fabric or steel bearing the Faerghus coat of arms had been ripped off and incinerated, smashed and melted down with spells of Fire. A single lance, of which there were many, was left where it had stabbed clean through the back of his neck and buried into the soft earth below, pinning his face against the dirt. Soil mixed with a large amount of blood covered almost the whole of his mouth, cheeks, and remaining eye. Three of his teeth were missing—two from the bottom jaw, one off the top. His gauntlets had been removed, although whether this was done before or after his death is indeterminate. A sizeable lock of his hair on the side of his skull left exposed appeared to have been cut off and taken as well, as opposed to his head, per Adrestian custom. As to why it was done is unknown. His cloak and furs, which had before belonged to the late King Lambert, were found but a few strides away in a crumpled heap in the mud.

So reads the report given to the round table of the standing Alliance Army, on the fourth night of the Harpstring Moon, Imperial Year 1186. Outside, the third day of turbulent rain batters the thick, golden canvas of the advisor’s pavilion, and the reporting lieutenant from the corps sent to investigate the scene stumbles over every sixth word. She’s young. Not a day over seventeen. While Felix would like to blame the bile rising in his throat on her painful delivery, it might not be exactly correct. 

Felix finds himself recalling once how Margrave Gautier had spoken on a miserable, drizzly night not too far removed from this one. The table at the Gautier estate was lavish, carefully adorned with the house regalia, the great curling horns of mountain sheep stuffed bursting into cornucopias of apricots and figs and dried pear. In the center was the boar their fathers had caught while hunting that afternoon, its snout open and filled with rosemary. 

_“We send our children to battle so that they may grow, steel themselves for the challenges to come,”_ the Margrave had once said, drunk and grinning on the King’s wine. “ _Like marriage."_

Felix remembers this, if only for the way Sylvain had twirled his goblet of goat milk in the same manner, mouthing the words in silence turned from his father’s watchful eye—much to the joy of them all, still too small to understand what it was to be grown up, to be married, to go to battle.

“ _It is the way of things.”_

It isn’t until almost 1195 that Areadbhar will return home to Fhirdiad once more, to rest in the Hall of Kings upon the insistence of a freshly crowned King of Almyra after it is discovered in one of the many, still-unexplored catacombs beneath Enbarr. Knights of the realm both old and new will gather at the castle doors to catch a final glimpse of it before it disappears into the royal tombs forever, to sit above the empty coffin its final master isn’t even buried in.

What very few know is that, in actuality, the lance will find its way to the Gautier estate, where it will lay beside its brethren in an empty room where the windows no longer open, amongst an empty table and deserted chairs. Quiet, and collecting dust. On rare, sunny days, the light will catch on the length of its blade and fill the room with an unearthly glow.

But none of that has come to pass, yet.

Right now, in 1186, while Felix holds very still in his seat between Leonie Pinelli and Marianne von Edmund, Areadbhar is being squirrelled away into a deep, dark place, the dried entrails of its final victims still clinging to its maw.

Right now, Claude and the Professor are laying plans, brickwork for their next move on Fort Merceus while Lorenz and Bernadetta push markers around their map, the parchment peeling off the table at both ends. Sylvain stands at Claude’s other side, chin tucked down, thumb resting against his lower lip. Now, on this night, he is reserved in his suggestions, silent even when Claude nudges their shoulders together. It isn’t until Hilda declares her own exhaustion that anyone else seems to notice how late the hour has become. It isn’t until they’re all standing, stretching and testing how much their new wounds can take that the Professor taps two fingers to Felix’s elbow. The tent is near emptied. They are alone. 

“Felix,” the Professor says, their tone slack and steady. “Wait a moment.”

A curl of apprehension gnashes its teeth against his ribs. “Okay.” 

The Professor goes to their seat at the head of the table, bending to riffle through a small bag they keep hung on the side. Felix follows, focusing on keeping his footsteps as silent as possible on the tamped grass floor. If the Professor—if _Byleth,_ as they’re so often reminding them all to call them now, notices his caution, they do not appear to mind or care. On any other day this is one of the qualities Felix likes about them, but now it only serves to tighten the coil of unease strung taut around his abdomen. 

“How are you, Felix?” they ask, crouching at the bag’s side, arranging something in its depths.

He suppresses the immediate urge to flee from the room. It’s not often his _flight_ wins out over _fight_ —but the careful, flat interest in the Professor’s voice sends every hair on the back of Felix’s neck standing straight up. 

“We’re at war and none of us are dead yet,” he says, instead of answering. “I’m fine.”

The Professor gives a quiet hum of agreement. “The Empire is a strong opponent. It is what you always wanted.”

To that, Felix says nothing. Nothing would explain how the world had molded into a violent shape around him, when he was fourteen and watched the one thing he thought absolute be torn asunder to nothing but the bloody swing of a lance. Now he has heard of the beast’s fall and Felix’s mind still holds the shape of a blade. It has changed nothing. 

Felix shifts his weight, scratching at the still healing, bruise-pocked skin of his left forearm, idly uncomfortable in his own head until the Professor stands, at long last. In their hands is a small bundle of unadorned bandage, the kind used to wrap leg wounds when they fall near a thick gush of blood. The cloth is dirty white, holds a vague shape in its depths. 

“For you,” they simply say, palms out flat, extending the bundle to him in offering.

Felix looks at the placid curve of the Professor’s frown, down at the little bundle and back up again.

“Why?”

“Because it is yours.”

“I don’t understand.” He tries to think for a moment, remembering their Professor’s odd quirk from so many years ago. “I haven’t lost anything.”

“I do not know if it was yours, originally,” the Professor says. “But I believe it is now.”

“What does that even _mean_?” Felix frowns. His stomach hurts. He wants to be rid of this place, to swing his sword against the air until sleep comes to drag him under. 

Byleth simply lifts the bundle up once more. It bounces in their hands. Their eyes are black and blue as a darkening bruise.

“Fine,” he mutters, dragging his hand up to circle his fingers around the swaths of cloth. Byleth doesn’t smile, but the corners of their mouth twitch.

The parcel is lightweight, short and thin. He knows it is some form of weapon on instinct alone, but it’s not until he flips the first strip of cloth over to reveal what lies underneath that the realization hits him square in the throat, so hard he nearly chokes on it. 

It’s a dagger. Felix knows this without any further investigation because it is a dagger he knows. A dagger he remembers for the cold weight pressed to his palms in a promise, an oath. There’s a smattering of soaked up blood on the leather scabbard.

The thought occurs to him that he is going to vomit. He almost does. Felix lurches, every bone in him aching as he swallows down that night’s dinner for a second time. Byleth pats a soft and steady rhythm on the flat of his shoulder until he shudders, draws away another few steps. He can’t recall them coming closer. 

“But they took his weapons.” Felix doesn’t feel his mouth move, hardly believes he’s spoken aloud. The words fall out of his mouth, unbidden and unwanted. They taste like iron on his tongue. “This doesn’t make sense.”

“You were listening to the report, then?”

“Don’t mock me.” Felix purses his mouth down until it disappears. The Professor still hasn’t quite kicked that habit from their school days. “Of _course_ I was listening.”

Byleth goes silent, their hand still poised in the air where Felix had been standing.

“How?” he whispers, softer than intended.

“Hilda.” 

Shock ripples through him in a numbed shiver. “What?”

“She saw it happen. It was all she could recover.” Their hand drops back to their side. “If you want to thank anybody, thank her.”

Felix doesn’t know what’s building in him, but it doesn’t feel like gratitude. He blinks once, twice again, and sees a pair of small gloves reaching out, cupping the dagger next to his, the air so cold when it hits his face that his teeth chatter. Felix blinks again, and all that’s left is the shake in his own fingers. His hands, trembling and alone.

His gaze catches on the splatter of viscera again. Felix’s eyes dart around the room until he finds an empty bucket they use to catch leaks in the tent canvas, hurries to its lip, and heaves up everything inside him with one solid retch.

☾

Dimitri had been born on the most miserable night of the Ethereal Moon, the greatest blizzard of their age snowing in the royal family and their vassals for weeks as it blew over Fhirdiad.

It was a snow so thick the court mages only just managed to carve a path to the main gates and stables before exhausting themselves of their magic. The great tunnels they dug out were rung in trellises of lace-like ice to keep the snow melting off the eaves from blocking in any unsuspecting travelers en route to their destination. In spite of the frigid cold, when Lambert announced the birth of their next king, the people took to the streets early as the following dawn to celebrate. The bards strung their harps and sang out snow-burdened window sills, the scent of spiced walnuts and smoked bear meat flooding down alleyways, places sparse with hope and life now kindling new under the promise of a bright future.

Felix knows this because his father tells them so, eleven years to the day later. Early dusk is bitterly cold in the palace gardens, the wind gnawing at his nose, long gone numb and frozen with exposure even as he burrows further into the thick knit of his woolen scarf. The festivities ran long that day, and Felix had spent the majority of them in Dimitri’s shadow, and when Dimitri was pulled from him for his princely duties he’d clung to Sylvain’s hand, or wrapped himself around Ingrid’s arm. But Sylvain is older, almost to his fourteenth summer, and spends much of his time complimenting the court ladies on their Almyran jewels in a way that makes Felix’s stomach go sour.

Glenn had been busy, occupied with the fresh burden of impending knighthood and standing guard at Dimitri’s side. A shield does not rest until one puts it down. Ingrid spends most of the celebration mimicking the firm way Glenn holds his hands behind his back, which makes her exceptionally difficult to cling to, despite Felix’s valiant efforts. 

Dimitri is quietly gallant about the whole affair, as he usually is—nervous, excitable, poised to accept whatever the diplomats have to give him with a bow and respectable smile. And they have an awful lot to give—Felix would know. It takes two hours to get through the gift-giving alone. The only time he, or either of them, really, show any interest is when one of the kingdom’s patrons procures something steel or sharp. All the better if it happens to be both. 

There’s a quiver of carved arrowheads from the duke in Magdred, a short sword embossed with Dagdan gold at the hilt from Margrave Conand. Cassandra slips them pieces of sugared clove candy alongside her father’s presentation of a chessboard, carved from the eggshell tusks of the saber tooth cats that prowl the far southern reaches of Sreng.

The jewel of it all is a light throwing spear from the Lord Lonato of Castle Gaspard, the shaft an intricate pattern of woven vines and honeysuckle, the flat blade itself christened by the Blaiddyd coat of arms engraved at the base. It can’t weigh much more than Felix’s forearm but reaches far enough to snip the end of Glenn’s tasseled, ceremonial overcoat when Dimitri swishes it back in an experimental swing. The twinkle in the lord’s eye is a happy one when Felix and Dimitri run their small ungloved fingers over the spear in reverence, all the awe and giddiness in their flood of questions entirely inappropriate for the occasion. Behind him, the lord’s son is attempting to hide a chuckle behind his hand with a cough.

In the aftermath, once the diplomats have retired for dinner and spirits, the garden is frothing over with fresh snow, and Felix is falling asleep on Dimitri’s shoulder. His chest is a pit of warmth, comfortable against the hart fur lining Dimitri’s new cloak—Felix buries his nose in it. It doesn’t smell like him yet, like cedar bark soap and horsetail. It’s strange. 

His father is saying something, kneeling to pat the shoulder Felix doesn’t have his head against. He can feel his father’s reassuring pressure there like the opposite end of a scale, Dimitri tipping with the weight, and in his petulance Felix grips Dimitri’s hand tighter, wriggles until Dimitri’s whole arm is engulfed in the fluffy down of Felix’s coat. His eyes are leaden, falling heavy and fast. Sleep is drifting around the corners of his body when a familiar, elk skin glove comes to smooth the top of his head.

“Felix,” his father coaxes. “May I borrow His Highness? Just for a moment.”

Felix gives his best effort in molding his face to a scowl. He shakes his head. He feels Dimitri stifling his laugh through the tremor in his shoulders. His father smiles small, the hand petting his hair moving to tug Felix’s hood up over his head. 

“Alright, fair enough. I suppose we’ve deprived you of each other enough for today. Just his hand, then. It will only take a moment.”

Felix’s scowl deepens, an effort without much effect around his tired, frozen face. There’s a shifting, and then Dimitri’s smile dips into view. His nose is ruddy, cheeks wind-rubbed to red. Felix’s frown lightens, just a little.

“It’s alright,” Dimitri says, but Felix remains unconvinced. Dimitri’s hair whips over his face in tufts of gold when he turns back. “May we do it together?”

“Your Highness...”

“Together,” Felix mumbles, the last claws of sleep slinking away from him. 

“Together.” Dimitri nods, enthused with the idea. The look he turns back to Rodrigue is bellied with the weight of his new expectations.

Felix doesn’t notice, but it is one of the few times his father doesn’t question Dimitri’s line of thinking with the eye of an advisor or teacher. Of a man preparing for the worst. He offers Dimitri council many times in the years to come. It wouldn't have been unusual. 

“Yes,” Felix finally says, clears his throat out of a sleep-muffled voice. “Whatever _Dima_ does, I’ll do, too.”

It’s not until years later that Felix will understand what a concession his father had made on his own behalf—in this instance, and in so many others. It isn’t until many years later, or maybe even after that, when Felix lies in the chilled midst of death for the last time, that he wonders if he ever knew anything of Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius at all. 

If only it were always so simple.

So simple, just a brush of a thought, when Felix blinks up between them, and caught in the middle of their two pleading gazes, his father has no choice but to acquiesce.

“As you wish,” he says with a sigh. “Both of you, please hold out your palms.”

The wind sends flurries catching on the crevices of their sheepskin gloves when they fold out their hands together, and Felix shivers with the loss of Dimitri’s body heat pressed flush against him. His father reaches into the folds of his long coat, stooping once again to kneel on one knee before them. The box is slim and plain, a gleaming black cherry wood that Felix recognizes from the forests around their home. Even the latch is simple and silver. It opens with a small click upon his father’s knee. The box is angled away and both of them crane their necks, straining to see what’s inside.

“For many an age,” his father says, his hands moving with an uncharacteristic gentleness. “The houses Blaiddyd and Fraldarius have sworn our oaths of undying dedication and loyalty to one another, unbroken by conflict and the passage of time. 

The lid of the box closes. In the muted air, it is a collapsing sound Felix will not forget.

In his father’s hands is a dagger, sheathed in a small, stitched scabbard. Short, not any longer than the length of ribbon Ingrid uses to tie her hair. The imprint of their respective family crests overlap in the center of the scabbard’s distance—the sharp points of the Blaiddyd star stabbing down through the soft, middling crescent of the Fraldarius’ half-moon. Around the thin hilt, two lions chase the tips of each other’s tails as the sun nestled in the pommel bathes them in its warmth.

“We shall always be the shield at the side of the King. Your sacred duty is ours. So promised was my father to your grandfather. So as I am to yours.” The dagger is a smooth glide of white in the snow as Felix’s father unsheathes it. “As my sons are to you, Your Highness.”

He places the dagger’s length between their outstretched hands, Felix’s thumb overlapping with Dimitri’s ring finger. He can feel the ice of the blade through his gloves. Felix holds his breath. He wonders if Dimitri does, too. The silvery steel ripples in the fading light like water, like a stone spun out over a lake, still as death.

His father continues, “May you carve a path that is your own, Your Highness. May you forever keep a sword and shield at your side.”

Felix chances a glance at Dimitri’s face—the stiff tremble as he holds his chin steady, hair freshly washed and cut, soft and shining as wheat blossoms when it falls against his eyes. Far within the castle’s halls, a clock chimes the changing of the hour, and Felix’s world shifts a whole degree west, tilts sharply, falls on its axis.

Everything inside him moves. The realization is a quiet dawn over the corners of his chest. He doesn’t understand it now, the sensation of joy that overtakes him at the mere mention of Dimitri’s name. A part of him never does.

It will be his own eleventh winter soon, and he hardly understands why when he looks at Dimitri all he sees is a world gone brilliant with light. 

☾

Felix doesn’t believe in ghosts. 

The dead don’t frighten him the way they do Ashe, or Annette, don’t haunt his dreams the way they did the boar, or how he imagines they might Dedue. He’s never been one for stories told in the dark. 

But there are exceptions to every rule—and the initial news of Dimitri’s execution, when Felix is on the cusp of nineteen, is more confounding than anything else.

 _You didn’t know?_ He almost screams it to the top of his father’s head, neck bent like a branch beneath heavy snow. _Dimitri’s been dead for years. Didn’t you ever notice?_

Because Felix has always seen Dimitri’s ghost, the shadowed apparition of the boy he knew in every small act of kindness, every smile he gave away, waning at the edges. He’s watched a monster wear the corpse of his best friend since they were fourteen, heard him call Felix’s name in his voice, laugh the same, hollow imitation of his laugh.

_How do you mourn something when it’s standing right in front of you? How do you bury them when they still know how you take your tea, that the color of their eyes has always been your favorite shade of blue?_

The ghost of the boy he once loved is nothing new. Felix knows how to handle that.

It isn’t until Felix stows the dagger under his pillow, sheathed and sealed shut, that the haunting begins in earnest.

☾

Two nights after Gronder, Sylvain crawls into Felix’s bed. 

They lay beside each other over the blankets, boots and gore-splattered clothes still on, armor shed in a grimy pile by the closed tent flap. Nobody undresses in full the first handful of days after a battle. Not when the Empire still has its axe poised at their neck. 

They hadn’t spoken, not truly, since the fateful afternoon after the battle’s end. Sylvain had given him space, not at his own request, but because Sylvain must know that’s what he needs. Perhaps what they both need. Felix doesn’t know where Sylvain’s been sleeping the past two days, but he knows it hasn't been with him, that it’s _because_ of him Sylvain’s been scarce and scant in the time they’d normally spend together. Felix tries not to dwell on it. 

They don’t touch, the gentle curl of Felix’s fists but a breath from Sylvain’s nose. His bare hands act as a barrier of sorts—as they always have. Keep the violent things between them like a spacer, a blockade stuffed with misunderstanding, everything they’re both too frightened to say aloud. It’s been like this since the war began. Ever since they’d set out from Galatea so many moons ago, the monastery in the reflection of their eyes on the horizon.

Felix feels beneath his pillow edge for the dagger’s reassuring length. He touches it with just the tips of his fingers.

(A numeration of the things they don’t speak of: the kingdom, their fathers and brothers, Dimitri, how the tenderness Sylvain touches him with boils long and hot in his stomach, the way it doesn’t fade even when Felix pulls away. Dimitri, always Dimitri.)

Felix keeps his eyes closed as Sylvain settles beside him, hears him knead the pillow and fall into it with a soft sound. Felix can feel his breath against his skin, the steadying of it as his heartbeat slows. Any other night Sylvain might provide commentary, as he’s apt to do on days the war is one slow pull of a knife after another, when they stumble through their tent flaps dead-bone exhausted and counting all the wounds that should’ve killed them. 

Tonight, Sylvain says nothing for a very long time. Felix is drifting near the drowsy confines of something next to sleep when the blankets tug around him, tucking in closer around his back. The press of Sylvain’s forehead is gentle as he nuzzles his nose into Felix’s palms.

“Did you see Ingrid?” he asks, once their collective breathing has evened once more.

Felix opens his eyes at that, the question pulling him out of the hazy, dead sleep-state he’d been hovering over. Sylvain’s own eyes are shut. Felix wants to see them, but does not tell him so.

“No,” he says instead. “Did you?”

“Nope.”

The pause is a heavy weight scraping the floor, and Felix can hear that same, final conversation playing out in Sylvain’s head, as he’s heard it so many times before. Ingrid and the pale light from her childhood bedroom window, how Sylvain had held his horse still in the courtyard below it, staring up for a final glimpse of her face even as their minutes to escape turned to seconds. Ingrid, in all her angry resilience and staunch-held belief. Ingrid, turning away from them for the last time.

Felix knows his anger is beginning to simmer again. Sylvain knows it too, when he decides to steer the conversation in a sharp turn to the left. 

“I’m glad Dedue’s alive, at least,” he breathes, his small laugh at the end twisting, sardonic. “I almost couldn’t believe it when he came charging at me with that giant axe like he was trying to kill me.”

“He _was_ trying to kill you, Sylvain.”

“Hm,” Sylvain hums. “You think so?”

Felix _knows_ so. He hadn’t seen Dedue, but he knows him well enough to know that if the boar had commanded them to die, Dedue wouldn’t have thought twice about cutting Sylvain—about cutting _any_ of them—down. He knows it just as he knows spring in Faerghus comes late and leaves early. As an inescapable, ineffable fact. He doesn’t say it, because Sylvain knows, too.

The only sound he hears is Sylvain’s breath against his skin. A stray lock of hair falls over his eyelids, a reddened shadow in the low light. Felix swallows, but it catches on the painful, throbbing words in his throat.

“Sylvain?” He speaks low, unsure if he’s fallen asleep. Sylvain gives a grunt and Felix smothers the shudder crawling up his chest as he continues. “I’m… sorry.”

Sylvain gives a tired huff, almost a scoff in the back of his mouth. “What could you even be apologizing for right now?” 

Felix was hoping it wasn’t going to come up. He was hoping Sylvain would just take it and move on—but he’s committed to it now, even if it burns like bile all the way up. “For what I said before.”

“Sorry, don’t think I quite recall. What were your exact words, again?” 

“You know what I mean.”

“Maybe I wanna hear you say it.”

Felix pinches his nose, and Sylvain’s small, muttered _ouch_ is more for show than anything else. It is always times like this that Felix is overwhelmed with the thought of what a world would be like without him. 

“Don’t push your luck,” he mutters.

“Aw, come on.” Sylvain opens his eyes, the fresh-tilled earth of his irises meeting Felix halfway. “I thought for a second I might’ve died and actually gone to heaven. The last time you apologized to me was when you were, what? _Twelve_?”

Flush crawls up his neck, hot and pressing, like an infection. “Just forget it, then.”

“Hey.” Sylvain brings a hand up to wrap around Felix’s own. “I never said I wouldn’t accept it.”

Felix lets him drag their hands down together, until there’s nothing between them but the tenuous knot of their fingers intertwining. Felix keeps his eyes on the hold Sylvain has over him, the way his thumb smooths over the ridges of his knuckles in a slow, careful ministration. As if he’s swiping over a smudged, tarnished pane of steel.

“I’m sorry,” Felix breathes again, his whisper like smoke, burning all the way up his throat. 

“It’s alright,” Sylvain echoes with a whisper of his own, calm and heavy. “Really.”

He sounds tired. Felix tries to remember a time in any recent history when he didn’t. Outside, the army is a beating pulse pounding around them, restless and steady. Felix could almost lose himself in it. In the thrum of his own blood in his throat, in the steady rhythm of Sylvain’s in the soft of his wrist. 

He’s almost asleep again when Sylvain opens his mouth. 

“Your hair’s getting long,” he says, releasing one hand to reach up and tuck the loose strands behind Felix’s ear. Felix blinks up at the blur of him through under his lashes and it’s like stepping on broken glass, a sharp prick of pain he hadn’t expected to be there. “Do you think you’ll cut it again?”

The words in-between remain unspoken: _like you did before? When we left the Academy and you took a knife to it like it was your own insides? Is it going to happen again?_

Felix’s mouth curdles, tucking his chin down. It’s the closest he can come to hiding his face when they’re this close.

“No,” he says, eventually. “I don’t think so.”

Sylvain’s thumb has moved from stroking his knuckles to running a soft, repetitive line across his temple. Felix doesn’t mind this touch as he might’ve years, even months ago. He lets himself feel the comfort in it in ways he hasn’t in a long time.

“Well, either way,” Sylvain says, speaking above a half-whisper for the first time. “If you do, at least ask me to help you this time. Or Mercedes.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, let’s just say-” Sylvain reaches back, pulls his fingers through the mess of Felix’s unbound hair. “No one’s ever accused you of being… _delicate_.”

The tease breaks Felix out of whatever reverential hold he’d been pinned under, his brow scrunching down into a glare. He flips around in one fluid motion, slipping out of Sylvain’s grasp and curling up tight onto his side.

Sylvain reaches out for him. He always does, even as he laughs, soft and muffled at Felix’s expense. 

“Felix, don’t pout. I was just kidding.”

“I’m not having this conversation. Shut up.”

“Okay, _fine,_ it was cute. You did a good job. Is that better?”

“Goodnight, Sylvain.” 

Sylvain whines a high, keening note. “ _Felix.”_

In the quiet press of his own cheek against the pillow, Felix smiles, and for a moment there’s no thoughts of the war raging at their backs, of the world splitting everything they know into little pieces of nothing, scattering them to the wind. Later, when he knows Sylvain is turned away and asleep, Felix will roll over and press himself to the warmth of his spine, let his arms fall over his waist, and squeeze his eyes shut. His knees hit somewhere at Sylvain’s lower thigh when Felix burrows against him, sleeping as when they were small. 

As when they were children—Dimitri secure against the wall, Ingrid’s back to Felix between them, Sylvain on the edge of the bed, holding it all together, Felix stuck somewhere in the middle. Like the little white foxes that slept in their dug-out nests on the Gautier tundra, their tiny hearts beating together, blood-warm and secure. 

How they slept there waiting for that first glimpse of sun to spill over the snow, for the light breaking through the pines to tell them the spring world they knew was safe once more.

☾

Three years prior, on Dimitri’s eighth birthday, Glenn takes them all down to the river that cuts rivulets through the west-side of Fhirdiad.

The hour’s early, dawn still a sleepy light on the horizon. It’s early enough that the children of the city have yet to venture out on their ice skates, the air like puffs of cloud when they breathe out through their high-settled scarves. Sylvain and Glenn take turns carrying Dimitri, still half-asleep, while Ingrid and Felix stumble across the ice, legs wobbly with excitement as two newborn colts venturing out to pasture when the frozen fields begin to thaw.

It’s the first time and last time Felix falls through the ice—a soft, thin spot within the black, frozen river surface none of them could’ve predicted. The memory is fogged over by pain—an immediate, gut-wrenching cold pricking him from head to toe. The next thing he remembers is coughing up icicles into his lap and someone throwing his soaked clothes away, layer after layer, how it hurt to move when he blinked. Sylvain and Glenn sacrifice their fur coats to swaddle him, and thinking back now, it’s fortunate they’d chosen their getaway for so many hours before sunrise.

He’s sure Sylvain and Glenn had run quick as their feet could carry them, but Dimitri and Ingrid no doubt slowed them down. They must’ve been quite a sight on the sleet-slick back streets of Fhirdiad. Children, in their noble clothes and house colors, bolting from some unknown terror they’d seen beneath the snow, or seen bubbling up from the surface of the ice.

Dimitri cries the whole way back to their rooms, and Ingrid spends her time peering with watery eyes where Felix lays in Glenn’s arms, holding one of his icy hands between her own, puffing her breath in an attempt to warm it. Felix falls asleep, or unconscious, just as they pass through the doors into the entrance hall. Even now, he isn’t quite sure of the difference between the two.

Nothing much comes of it, of course. Felix spends the rest of the day in tar pitch blackness and wakes the following morning with a terrible fever. Were it not for his father, for the _King’s_ insistence, he’s sure Dimitri would’ve spent the whole of his birthday celebration at Felix’s bedside. He almost does, his tantrum one for the ages until Sylvain steps in and volunteers as tribute to His Highness’s noble cause. Miklan would stand in his stead, for the gift-presenting and noble mingling alike.

Although he doesn’t get his father’s express permission to do so—Sylvain decides to forgo the festivities altogether. He brushes off any protests and totes a chair to lean against the edge of Felix’s bed, lays his arms out flat and sets his chin between his knuckles.

Sylvain spends the afternoon cracking jokes, teasing when Felix sneezes and it _sounds like a kitten_ , anything to make Felix laugh or swat at him in equal parts. The nursemaid smiles closed-mouth and amused at their antics, shaking her head before she shuts the door and lets them alone.

“The Young Lord Fraldarius is to be _resting,_ ” she reminds, with a pointed look around the doorframe. Sylvain grins, and even at this age there’s an edge there, hollowed out and filled with honey. He gives a half-wave, confidence-easy and small as the door clicks shut. Felix doesn't like that smile and lately, when there are others around, it is all Sylvain ever does.

Felix looks down at the empty bowl of rice porridge in his lap, feeling sticky and nauseated. His fever’s a stubborn thing, and the bishop that’d been by earlier had spent a long time conferring with his father in one of the castle’s many drawing rooms in a tight voice.

“Sylvain.” Felix lets his head loll to the side, listless, and says with a rasp, “ _Vanshka._ ” 

“What?” Sylvain asks, not opening his eyes, content to keep his head pillowed in his hands.

A hundred things flick through Felix’s mind—he wants _Dima_ , and his mother, and the spiced cinnamon cream they drink every year once the season turns, but all that comes out of his mouth is a strangled, petulant whine. It stings and aches all the way up into his nose. He extracts one of his shivery hands from under the blanket and claws his pale fingers over the fabric, the porridge bowl slipping off his side. He opens his mouth to say something and all that comes out is a prickled cough.

Sylvain’s eyes open, slow and lazy at Felix’s persistent tamping, and blows out a sigh through his nose. Felix bores his swimming eyes into him, trying to blink away the feeling of existential dread attached to being small and stuck in bed with a cold. Surely, the sickness will never end. Sylvain sighs once more, rolling his eyes up to the ceiling. 

“Okay, fine,” he says, after a moment of silence. “Scoot over.” 

“No, wait,” Felix pleads, because he’d realized what being close would mean too late. “What if you get sick, too?”

“No way. I’m _way_ stronger than you.” Sylvain smiles, toothy and goofed up.

Felix glares, with all the disagreement he can muster. “Nuh-uh.”

“Wanna bet?” 

He thinks of how he’d seen Sylvain hoist himself up from a steep ditch in the forest last moon, smiling even as his knees and palms were scraped red and raw. He hadn’t even teared up. Not _once._

“…No,” Felix grumbles. When he swallows it tastes like a lump of pins and needles. Sylvain nudges his side through the blankets.

He knows he should protest this, but his limbs are weak as softened dough, and he misses Dimitri’s warmth like his own heart. When either of them were sick, they were never _not_ together—much to every maid's, as well as their mother and fathers' consternation and concern. If one were to fall ill, the other was sure to follow quickly in suit right behind him. That’s how it had always been.

So Felix wriggles as much as he can until Sylvain climbs up and flops down flat on his back beside him, because it’s comforting in a way that’s familiar, that’s routine, in its own way. The same vein of a different warmth. When Felix coughs, ragged and crackling, Sylvain doesn’t flinch away.

For a time all they do is stare up at the bed’s canopy, a dark and fathomless green, the color favored by Dimitri’s mother. Sylvain folds his hands neatly over his stomach with a sigh, and Felix shuffles to shadow him beneath the thick of his goose down comforter.

“ _Vanshka,"_ he says again, breaking the quiet. “Am I going to die?”

Sylvain’s smile crinkles before he manages to bite down on it again. “No, I don’t think so.”

“But _Dima_ said—" 

“ _Mitya_ ’s just scared, that’s all. We all were! You should’ve seen Glenn’s face when I pulled you out of the water. I know _I_ won’t be forgetting it anytime soon.”

Felix crinkles his mouth, clearly unconvinced as tears began to rise up in big, fat wells behind his lashes. “I don’t want to leave everyone behind.”

“You aren’t _leaving_ us.” Sylvain flips up his hand to ruffle it through Felix’s hair. “You’re just sick. And tomorrow you’ll be better.” 

“But what if I’m not?” 

“The next day, then.” 

“But what if I _never_ get better?”

“You will,” Sylvain says. “You’re stronger than you think. I promise.”

As he blinks, sleep begins to settle into the corners of Felix’s eyes—the herbs in the tea they’d given him beginning to take effect. He fights it, whining when his eyes refuse to stay as open as he’d like, and now he wants to cry again because _what if? What if he doesn’t wake up?_

Through the high, blue-glazed windows, there’s the rhythm of moose-hide drums thrumming, a distant sound from far below. The fireplace is a tepid glow, evergreen logs burnt down to embers, snapping with a muffled noise as they fall apart. 

“ _Luschka,_ ” Sylvain’s voice breaks through his murky consciousness, low and comfortable. Like he senses something below the surface. “You know I’ll never leave you. Alright?”

“Never?”

“Never.” Sylvain sits up with a jolt, settling his weight on his splayed palms behind his back. His head lilts over his shoulder to give Felix another smile. 

“We’ll stick together till we’re both old men. And when we die, we’ll just… die together. Then we’ll never have to be apart.”

All Felix manages is a sniffle in response. Sylvain keeps his gaze focused on the high drapery above, the folds of it thick, immeasurable, and impossibly dark. The next words are scraped out of his raw throat as Felix wraps a hand around Sylvain’s fourth and pinky finger, holding him there with all his might.

“Do you promise?”

☾

The first time Felix sees Dimitri’s ghost, the air is humid, gauzy in the early hours of what would be Annette’s twenty-second birthday.

The Alliance forces are still in the dregs of its drink after their victory at Gronder, for whatever that word means here. Claude knows how to cast light at all the right angles in their little puppet box, knows how to give the impression of a day hard and soundly won. The truth is always a thread more tangled than it first appears, though, and the fact they’d won simply by forcing a retreat is one thing they shouldn’t forget.

Not that Felix disagrees with this approach; an army resting well on its most recent laurels is better equipped to handle the swamp lying in wait ahead.

Felix tramples over the underbrush with a vicious step. He’d done an admirable job of pushing Annette from his mind for the better part of the day, an empty hole burrowed inside his stomach since he’d woken that morning to find the blankets at his back stiff and cold, Sylvain’s warmth long since leached away. 

He hadn’t seen her at Gronder. He hadn’t seen much of anybody, save for the endless stipend of enemies that seemed to flow from the top of the southern hill like blood out an open wound. If she’s alive, they have no way of knowing. What little they might’ve known of the Kingdom’s meager forces either died with the boar or fled with Dedue. There’d been hardly a soul to even question, which at least would’ve let them know where any remaining forces lay in secret, or in hiding. At least they weren’t there, attempting to gore themselves on every passing pike as the Imperial soldiers were.

Small mercies, he supposes. If there is such a thing anymore. 

The fact remains that if Annette is dead, has _been_ dead and rotting away in the ruins of House Dominic for months, _years_ , they have no way of knowing that, either. The reminder is a dull knife dug into the shallow of his gut. 

Of course today, of all days, her songs are holding him hostage in his own head. Sleep the night before had been fitful, but the rhythm of it helps him put one foot in front of the other, keeps him from tripping over the brambled logs and low lying shrubs at the village perimeter. He can’t recall the exact words anymore—those were always her forte—but as always, the melody sticks to the softer parts of his mind, calls back the image of Annette venturing ahead, her bright braids bobbing as they skipped through the garden greenhouse, whistling and humming all the way. She’d only do it when she forgot he was there, her mind wandering to her studies of wind magic turbulence over water, to a hearth stone warmed in the depth of winter, her father a man as opposed to a hole in the fabric of her life.

They’re packed together and skirting around the edges of what were once Aegir lands, trickling south in a steady stream through old apple orchards and plains speckled in low-growing shrubbery. The first village they pass through is a burnt piece of nothing on the map—Sylvain had checked. There isn’t so much as a title ordained to it on their own small, creased map of Empire lands from his father’s study.

Up ahead, Felix watches the sway of Sylvain’s back atop his horse, black armor glowing a faint, miasmic, violet velvet when it catches the sunlight. They don’t expect any skirmishes today, if Judith’s patrols had any luck, but they’ve been fooled before. There’s low conversation behind them in the march, but otherwise their army moves in silence. The structure of the little village is beginning to thin now, the outline of its structures sparse. He does not think of Annette.

It’s more a hamlet than it is any proper place of commerce. Or, it had been, at one time. Now the handful of buildings scattered amongst the trees are peeling away and abandoned, wood razed away and rotting. What little stone’s left of them is mostly toppled. Globs of sunlight cast down through the thin, arid branches, and Felix wonders if he’ll ever grow accustomed to how bright and warm everything is south of the monastery.

The army passes through the village without a second glance up. It’s abandoned and empty. Whoever once resided here belonged to a place that no longer exists, where the Prime Minister of Adrestia, Duke Aegir, ruled his subjects with a false sense of liberty, and had a son who was fond of horses.

Felix hadn’t known Ferdinand—as he hadn’t known many of his classmates, out of disinterest or motivation, or some combination of both. But he remembers how Ingrid would arrive late after stable duty with the first son of Aegir in her wake. How they’d smell of hay and muck and morning dew when she pinched the soft of his arm, grinning in quiet glee at his yelp. The image of him in Felix’s head is vague at best, like looking through frosted glass. There are many things war does, and scrubbing the idea of what your enemy once was as an acquaintance, as someone with passions and fears like your own, is one of them.

Ingrid had liked him well enough. Felix finds himself glad, in a way, she wasn’t there to see Bernadetta notch the arrow that would shred through the torn gape in his armor and bury itself in his throat.

A flare of red hot frustration bubbles up and pops behind his heart, as it often does when he tries to think of the empty room in his head Ingrid once occupied. The possibilities of where she might be now are too vast and varied for Felix to think of without wanting to put his fist through something.

 _Stupid Ingrid,_ his mind supplies, feeling childish and small and hurt. Like when she’d steal his favorite wooden horse, or tuck into Glenn’s only open side at the dinner table. The moment lasts but a single breath. It is the most painful inhale he’s taken in weeks. 

They’re trudging upon the village outskirts, his anger still trying to slip loose of his wavering hold when the church comes into view. The steeple’s in a state of near-complete deconstruction, as much the rest of the buildings proceeding it. The width of it almost blocks their way through the trees, the crumbling walls of what must’ve once been the village’s pride, its edifice, now nothing more than broken stone, scattered piles of rotten wood ripped like entrails from the building’s belly.

As Felix picks his way over and around the wreckage, the black scorch marks become more apparent through the tall weeds. With a deep inhale it’s easy to pick out the acrid scent of Bolganone beneath the dirt and sticky grass—the scent of burnt earth permeating far below the surface. It isn’t long before the first crunch of bone cracking sounds from under his boot. 

The village hadn’t been abandoned. Someone had razed this place to the ground. 

This, in and of itself, is not a surprise. He no longer dwells on it, but not even time and exposure has been able to dull the sickly twist his stomach gives with each new place they pass through, with every instance of cruelty they unearth in their upwards trek through this curse of a war.

The army welcomes a break in the forest. The air is clearer here, less bogged down with death. They march but a league out of the village’s perimeter when a voice comes from somewhere deep in the ranks at his back. A voice, faint and indistinct at first, but gaining traction as others begin to join, a swell of sound that carries over the light breeze like a bell. The marching Alliance Army sings.

_I take my axe to the woods by the sea_

_Let the hounds howl, let the hounds howl_

_I leave for Rusalka in the morning, dear_

_Our path is long and the road is clear_

_I dare not wait for sunrise_

_Let the thrush cry, let the thrush cry,_

_I’ll venture not where the Creator’s sight strays_

_For my heart stays here in Aegir true,_

_As the Blue Sea Star calls me home, my dear_

_Calls me home to you_

The tune is low and lilting, a close cousin to the sound of spring in Fhirdiad, the song the church clergy sing when the last snow begins to melt. The same bright, mournful key. The same steady cadence.

Those hymns are some of the first songs Felix remembers hearing in all his life, a melody he’d hum along with as Glenn held him on his shoulders to touch the high, blooming branches of the crepe myrtles cresting the capital’s vast, octagonal plaza. Dimitri stuck to Glenn’s side, close enough to trip over each other’s boots. His hood was pulled up over his head, a thin mask of sheepskin to cover half his face. It was a flimsy disguise, one their fathers and Ingrid alike admonished them for ceaselessly upon their return to the castle. Glenn had snuck them out. Felix, for the life of him, can’t remember why. 

_“Glenn,”_ Dimitri had said, bouncing with each second-step as he walked. _“Where are we going?”_

Felix can’t recall what his brother had said in return. He doesn’t remember much of that afternoon, actually, aside from their stroll down the central promenade. It isn’t like him to linger in his own head, to let the memories play themselves out like this—but thoughts of Annette, and Ingrid, and the army’s tune is more than enough to dig up things he’d rather stay buried. He lets his eyes slide shut for a few steps, lids heavy.

“Felix, look!” Dimitri laughs, pointing at the procession of merchants filing into the plaza, their carts piled high and thick with great bear pelts from the mountains near Duscur, layers of fabric dyed deep and rich, indigo and garnet. “Do you see that?” 

Dimitri laughs again. Or, wait— 

_Wait. Laughs?_

It takes him a moment, for the realization to hit him. Felix almost stops, steps stuttering, near struck dead in his tracks. His eyes fly open to alight on the dirty scuff of his boots. His blood is a thin and shallow thud in his veins, his vision a narrow tunnel straight ahead.

The words hadn’t come from his head. They rang out, clear and soft as they might in the chill of dawning spring air, and Felix knows he does not imagine it when a cold gust rushes past his hand.

The glimpse of gold in the periphery of his vision is the only warning sign he gets before his breath rushes out of him in a punch to the chest. A flash against the dappling sun, small and nimble and hum-singing just ever-so-slightly off key in the way only a child can. His steps are soft as it skips at Felix’s side. A small, pale hand swings into view with each jump.

He knows those hands. That voice. He knows them no matter the season, or age, or time. He would know them in battle and in death, at the end of all things. 

And in death he had thought them to be. He _is_ this time, without refute, and yet there’s nothing to speak of evidence and truth when Felix dares a glimpse down and sees Dimitri, no more than six winters old, strolling at his side.

His clothes are a dark and royal blue, almost black against the dirty green plains, the hare fur lining his hood a stark, brilliant white. Felix watches his profile, the sheepskin catching on the point of his nose. Dimitri looks up to meet his gaze, and Felix knows he’s smiling by the way the malleable pelt, almost cloth-like, shifts around the corners of his chin with the change. His eyes are the dizzying shade of cerulean a river turns after rain.

“Glenn?” Dimitri repeats, like a songbird stuck on the same tune. “What’s wrong?” 

Dimitri’s mitten-clad hand reaches up and passes like nothing through his fingers.

Felix takes a moment, to take stock of his own limbs before snatching his hand away. Every bone in his body is screaming in him to run, but then Dimitri’s skipping ahead, running a few strides ahead before he stops, waiting for Felix, for _Glenn,_ to catch up.

_This isn’t happening. This isn’t real._

Felix keeps his gaze rigid, fixated on the swaying gray of Sylvain’s horse’s hindquarters, quickening his pace until he’s almost running to catch up. He doesn’t dare look to see if Dimitri—if that _thing_ is following him. He feels like a cornered dog, hackles raised over nothing, just the scent of the enemy on the air. 

“Glenn, Felix, look!” Felix hears, some ways ahead. His core _shakes_ , a volatile shudder _._

He shakes Sylvain’s knee as soon as he’s within grasp, trying to rein in any sense of urgency that might be bleeding through his fingers. _Gently._

Sylvain startles. “Wh—? Felix?” 

Felix’s grip tightens. He doesn’t dare look up to meet Sylvain’s gaze, too dually terrified and embarrassed of what he’ll see there, reflected back at him. He’s aware, vaguely, of Sylvain letting loose his hold on the reins and skimming the back of his hand down the side of his head, tentative and questioning before it comes to settle on his shoulder. Sylvain fans out his fingers, his hold gentle but more secure.

“Hey. What’s wrong? What happened?” 

The situation is a little too close to when they were children—Felix running scared or angry with tears to find Sylvain and curl up around his arm, rub his face into his sleeve, smelling of sweat and the honeysuckle his mother grew in the greenhouse.

“ _Luschka_?” the thing that isn’t Dimitri says, and Felix feels his resistance break like some animal instinct when he flicks his eyes over, prey caught in the eyes of a predator. The sound sucks out of the air, and his ears ring for but a moment before it all comes crashing back in. The frantic thread trying to pull his heart out of his throat lessens with each second until it finally slackens to nothing.

He looks and finds nothing but empty space. There’s nothing.

Felix surveys the field and it’s all as it once was—the grass a tepid green, lush and short, the few left of their Kingdom corps and Alliance-men trampling it with persistence. In the distance looms another patch of forest, the dark and twisting kind meant for fairytales and folk song.

“No.” His own voice is foreign in his head. “It’s nothing.”

He lets go of his hold on Sylvain’s knee, feels Sylvain’s hand slip from his shoulder, lingering a moment before dropping away.

“Forget it.”

☾

Felix had been born early that self-same, wretched winter. _Too early_ , as the midwives would say.

Labor was long and difficult. His mother’s handmaids ran out of rags and took to running buckets down the stairs to scrub them in the snow drifts piling at the servant door. He didn’t weigh more than two loaves of hole-y bread put together, cried until his nose bled, slept in fits before waking to fuss and cry once more. His appetite was sparse and picky. For weeks a healer had knelt by his crib side, day and night, the glow of magic like a second layer of heavenly paint coating the room. Nobody believed he’d last long enough to see the almond blossoms bloom come spring. 

Glenn tells him this five years before he goes to Duscur and does not come back. The smeared Fraldarius crest off the breast of his coat and gore-riddled scraps of his gauntlets are returned to their estate in a wooden crate. His sword is, too. Their father doesn’t allow Felix to touch it, and even now, in the throes of their kingdom’s wasting, he’s sure Glenn’s arming sword sits on proud display as their hearth crumbles to dust around it. 

But in this moment, on the cusp of his eighth year, Glenn’s piggybacking them through the snow, the drifts tall enough to hit Felix waist high. They’d gone down to one of the lower fields to practice his archery when the clouds rolled in, the dense snowfall upon them by mid-afternoon.

“Mother wouldn’t let me see you for almost _two_ moons. You were—” He hoists Felix up with a bounce, readjusting his grip under his knees. “—so _small._ All tiny and pink. Like a newborn mouse.”

Felix pouts, squirming in Glenn’s grasp to beat a balled-up fist down against his chest. “I’m not a _mouse!”_

Glenn laughs, and it carries through the trees, loud and unafraid. His brother always laughs with his whole chest when it’s just the two of them. “Ouch _, Luschka_. You forget your own strength!”

Felix kicks his legs and whines, sends Glenn scrambling to steady his hold, still laughing. “Alright, I yield, I _yield._ It appears I was mistaken!”

“Yes,” Felix sniffles. The notch of his bow digs where it’s slung between his shoulder blades, dull through his layers of winter clothes. “I am no mouse.” 

Glenn hums, teasing. “Oh? What are you, then?” 

Felix hums back in his own tenor rendition, long and drawn out as he tips his head back. The sky is an eye-aching blue between the thin, bare branches, the bright azure tone it flushes after a long, hard snow. He thinks of Dimitri back in Fhirdiad, how they’re set to travel within the next moon to celebrate Felix’s birthday together, and he startles with a gasp at his own genius revelation. Felix flops down against Glenn’s back to speak it into his ear, an almost fervent whisper. 

“A _sword!”_

Glenn’s quiet for a moment before his smile cracks open, his voice in the shape of a chuckle. “A sword is not an animal, dear one.”

“Well,” Felix frowns, clasping his cold fingers together in a fretful hold around Glenn’s neck. “Why does Father always say it’s what we must be, then?” 

The snow is a soft crumple under Glenn’s boots. He fumbles with a deep spot for a moment but does not falter. If it is a slip, it’s one Felix is far too young to notice. 

“Father is the bravest, most honorable man I know. There is no one finer to serve at our King’s side. But Felix,” Glenn’s hold under his knees tightens. “There is more to knighthood than wielding a blade or casting a spell.” 

A stray shock of inky hair falls loose from Glenn’s braid and catches Felix in the face. He sputters around it, and Glenn’s apology is a teasing one. 

“There is?” Felix manages, having successfully batted the hair out of his mouth. 

“Of course. We always have a say in what it is we want. What it is we wish to protect. Whether that be a kingdom or a person—it doesn’t matter. So long as you hold true to your own strength and fight for what _you_ think is right.” 

Glenn takes best after their mother: in his stature, tall and proud-shouldered, in the slight jut to his chin and the long, smooth waterfall of hair. Side by side, their profiles match with such exactness that from afar some mistake one for the other. He has her nose. The only thing his brother received from their father is his eyes—a strange and dark shade of blue. 

“Did you know,” Glenn says, when Felix is left unsure of whether he is allowed to agree. It’s one of his brother’s many talents—letting Felix feel comfortable in moments the world feels so big, so impossibly wide around him.

“In Duscur, they believe that when we die, we return to the earth to be born again in a completely different form. Our life returns to the earth so we may come back as something else. And I think—” Glenn huffs, steps up onto a boulder protruding through the drift. “I’d quite like to be a mouse.” 

They teeter on the rock’s edge for a breath. The woods are still and snow-hushed, Felix’s breath a puff of smoke when he frowns, a wave of unhappiness overtaking him in an instant. “But a mouse can’t protect anything! They’re too small, you’ll get all stepped on!”

“Oh, on the contrary. Mice are quick and sneaky. They’ll eat you out of house and home if you aren’t careful. They have a _voracious_ appetite. Just like you.” 

“ _Glenn!_ ”

“Hold tight now!”

Glenn’s knees bend, and they launch up and away, plummeting down into the powdery bank of white at their feet as Felix squeals in half-joy, half-terror. The snow erupts into powder around them upon landing, and Felix’s landing stays soft when he tumbles to the side to the sound of Glenn’s laughter, his shriek morphing into a laugh of his own.

The snow is _everywhere_ —in their hair, the folds of their clothes, stuck in Felix’s eyelashes. He’s still giggling when he looks at the apparent dampness of their coats and says, “Mother is going to be furious.” 

Glenn ruffles the top of his head. Chunks of clumped up snow fall and settle on the ground. He helps Felix up and brushes the rest of their clothes with minimal effect, knowing, in some sense, that the fabric is a lost cause. They go the short rest of the way hand in hand, the drift they’d jumped into the last of the deep sea waves separating them from even treading conditions. Felix has to walk brisk to keep up until Glenn shortens his steps.

“Glenn?” he says, home a tall spire of gray gates in the distance as they pass through a break in the wood.

“Hm?”

“Even if—” He begins. Shakes his head, starts once more. “If you come back as a mouse, then I will, too.”

“Had a change of heart, have you?” Glenn squeezes his hand once, twice.

“No, but—when I die, I want to come back and be your brother again. So, even if you’re a baby mouse this time, I’ll be there to help you. Just like you did for me.” He says it with such determination it would put the ox to shame—Felix even lifts his chin up as he says it, the same movement their father gives when appraising a fresh group of green recruits for the guard. 

Glenn doesn’t say anything, for a moment, and Felix can’t see him with his eyes closed. He doesn’t open them until Glenn’s knuckles meet with part of his hair and grind down. 

“Look at you, suddenly so responsible. Since when did you become so grown up, huh?”

Felix ducks away with an embarrassed groan. His grin betrays him, though, and when he takes off in a final sprint across the distance home, Glenn follows. Their footsteps are an uneven, crisscrossing path over the thin layer of snow as Glenn catches up with ease, scoops Felix up and throws him over his shoulder to run the rest of the way. Even the servant guards posted at the gate are chuckling as they trip across the threshold. 

Because Glenn is like that in the way of their mother, too—in that steadfast devotion, in how he holds a blade like he means to cleave the world in two. The morning he turns fifteen he’ll be Dimitri’s knight first, Felix’s brother second, and there is no one to explain this in a way that matters, in a way that makes sense when Felix learns there’s nothing left of Glenn even to bury. 

His brother, Glenn, who hated sour things and liars and loved the soft summer warmth when the sun would rise over the plum trees. Who had a soft spot in his shrewd, barbed-wire heart for foxes and birds, for his little brother, and not much else.

There were many things that didn’t return after Duscur.

And in that way, his brother was no exception.

☾

Felix learns a list of important truths in their three-week march to Fort Merceus. It takes him time to compile the list, of what he knows and what he doesn’t, longer still when Claude and the Professor seems intent on having them make the journey in half-length time. Each day they cover more ground than the last, and Felix spends his nights patching the blistered holes in his ankles, soaking their bloodied socks in cold water, and compiling his list of Knowns.

The first—he is the only one who sees Dimitri.

Or, whatever this… _thing_ might be—whether a spirit or something different altogether. It matters little. Felix is the only one who sees Dimitri running through their army’s camp as if it were his home, as if he knew it as the back of his sword hand. As if when Felix wasn’t looking they’d taken the long journey home, to the familiar quarters of Fhirdiad and its great streets of speckled granite, where they’re all simply playacting this battle, this war, for the young Prince’s amusement. 

Felix doesn’t entertain that particular thought for long. It makes him feel crazy, and a little too much like Dorothea for his liking. _It’s the theatrics,_ he thinks. _Either that, or the despair._ In all honesty, he doesn’t truly care to find out which.

The second—the Dimitri he sees isn’t the one he knows. Sometimes he’s seven and short-armed, fumbling with a child’s longbow when the length of his elbow doesn’t quite reach. Sometimes he’s a little younger, a little older, sleeping on the packed earth as if it were a feather-down bed, or calling for Ingrid, or Felix, Glenn or Sylvain, his father: _Hurry! You’re going to miss it!_

_Father said these sugar candies are the best in all the Kingdom. Please, have one._

_I don’t know. Do you think Sir Dominic will allow it?_

_I’ll help you up. Here, take my hand._

Once, when Felix bends to soak his whetstone in fresh oil, he sees Dimitri in the aftermath of the rebellion. Freshly fifteen, his light armor soaked down threadbare with drying blood, the spray of it splattering up his neck, flecking his lips and nose a honeyed scarlet. He sits beside Felix on a neighboring crate outside their supply convoy, his palms laid open on both his knees. His breath is lethargic, his eyes a twin pair of pearl-blue, glassy marbles. He does not speak, doesn’t so much as make a sound. Felix hurries to set his whetstone against his blade once more, the room threatening to shutter closed around him. When he dares look again, Dimitri is gone.

Of course he isn’t the same. It’d be foolish to expect anything else.

This should all be an obvious thing. His Dimitri had died long before the boar, with the beast, in a crypt he’d crawled into and caved in the door behind him. Felix hadn’t so much as let go as had him wrenched from his grasp, left with a hole deep and wide as the sky to bury him in. Felix had spent years shoveling in dirt with nothing but his bare hands, till his fingers bled and crusted over, calloused and unrecognizable. As children, it’s easy to believe the world one’s parents tell them is real, to take it as truth. It had been easy to see their lives as only worth the sum of their merits, their honor, their ability to stick steel into bone. 

It had been a different life. One he scarcely recognizes as his own. A _Dimitri_ he now hardly recognized as his own, and the traitorous part of him that whispers _now you sound like your father_ , quiets as soon as he picks up his blade again.

Needless to say, Felix spends much of their march training. 

The Dimitri he sees now is different. Different in a way that harkens back to the person Felix knew so many years ago. Or, the one he _thought_ he knew. There’s a fine line there he isn’t sure he’s ready to cross just yet—the one where he thinks somewhere, beneath the beast languishing in its own misery, might’ve been the boy he’d been in love with since before he knew his own name.

It wouldn’t change anything, he knows. Even if it were true.

Because the third, and perhaps infinitely more perplexing fact is that Dimitri doesn’t seem to see _him_ , either.

☾

Felix Hugo Fraldarius and Sylvain Jose Gautier, second sons and Heirs to Their House, are counted as deserters of the Holy Kingdom’s Resistance Army on the third chilly week of the Wyvern Moon, year 1185.

Were Faerghus still any more _kingdom_ than _dukedom_ this would mean punishment under penalty of treason against the crown. A crime punishable by death—a more than likely public execution. But the throne has long since sat empty, and when Felix pictures the word _loyalty,_ the image of the Blaiddyd’s royal blue and the cry of their battle horns no longer call him home.

 _Home_. It is like coating the bitter side of a wound in salt. The Kingdom is a sinking ship, just as everything they’ve ever known, and Felix would rather damn himself to hell than go down with it. 

The year’s waning in the Ethereal Moon’s twilight when the ruins of the village at the crumbling edge of Garreg Mach come into view as an all-encompassing, pervasive shade of red.

It may be the setting sun, just a trick of the light as night falls, but something buried deep and screaming within him says that is not the case. When Felix still held caution close to his chest, the sight of so much spilled blood sent the hair on the back of his neck rising. It hasn’t happened in a long time.

Still, the clench in his gut remains: this is a dangerous place, a ground no unholy foot has any right to step upon, anymore. 

Which is too bad, considering Sylvain’s steady pace just behind him, a little to his left. The Goddess will have no choice but to be silent, locked away in her righteous fury, unheard and unanswered so long as a son of Gautier roams the lands. None of it matters to Felix—any god, living or dead, can rot away in their empty tombs for all he cares. 

The pace of their horses is a mere amble by now, rightfully tired between the four-day hard ride and the constant, nervous vigilance of their riders. Any time spent between the opens jaws of the Empire is a waiting game, moving between razed village after village, hoping they make it to the next gap of cover before its maw snaps shut.

A misstep doesn’t mean a simple death with the crests buried in their blood—it means humiliation, desecration, a torturous end before they’re put down like beasts behind the barn. The children of the Duke and Margrave at the head of the Kingdom’s pitiful resistance would be a pretty prize for any Empire sympathizer. Cornelia would hang both their corpses on the great, gold gilded gates of Fhirdiad as a message, their heads strung like jewels upon the palisades.

Taking horses at all had been a risk—one Felix had come within an inch of cursing Sylvain to the eternal flames and back for on more than one occasion in their arduous trek south. Were Ingrid with them they’d at least have eyes in the sky.

Felix stuffs the thought down before it can come up for air. It promptly drowns. 

The path up to the monastery’s base is rock-riddled and uneven. They dismount at Sylvain’s prudent suggestion, and Felix’s knees almost buckle with the weight of his own frame hitting the ground. He’s never been one for horseback—his pony growing up had been a nippy bastard and Felix wouldn’t so much as enter the stables without accompaniment. Said accompaniment was more often than not the boar. There’s a reason Felix feels alone and unbalanced on the sway of a horse’s back.

The mounts they’d swiped in secret are the finest the Fraldarius estate could produce, some of the few remaining this late in the season. The last of their kind, so to speak. Many had perished on the battlefield alongside their riders, and those that hadn’t were taken for their meat and tendons, the hair of their tails especially good for tying wound compresses down when braided firmly together.

Felix rests his forehead on the saddle flap, damp with cold mist and sweat. The mare lowers her head, lipping at the few hardy tuffs of grass poking through the rubble. He doesn’t flinch when Sylvain touches his elbow but he feels the startle jolt deep in his guts. 

“I’m fine,” Felix spits out, drawing the reins over his horse’s head. He doesn’t look at Sylvain as he does it. The discomfort etched in the crease of his brow will give him away, as it always has. Felix begins the tricky journey up to the monastery’s front gates without looking back and behind him, he can hear Sylvain beginning to grin. 

“I forgot while we were all out learning to ride, you stayed in and played with my father’s hunting dogs.”

“I did not,” Felix corrects. Pebbles skitter as they climb. “While you were all in the stables brushing ponies, I honed my swordsmanship.”

Sylvain snorts. “Ah, of course. Silly me, how could I _ever_ forget.”

Felix’s disagreement isn’t entirely based in truth, and they both know it. The Margrave’s pack of bloodhounds _had_ loved him the best between them, but more often than not, when Felix was too unsure or tired to venture to the riding fields, Miklan would take him to the garden courtyard and show him how to wield a lance. He was a good teacher, stern without turning his firm words to cruelty. When Felix bobbled a strike, Miklan would bop him on the crown of his head using the bottom of his brandistock with a gentle tap and say, _again._

Felix remembers, though, how once Sylvain came racing down the garden path, his arming doublet still on. How he’d stood there next to the pink tulip beds, panting and wide-eyed at the two of them, sweating in the middle of autumn.

 _“What do you want, brat?”_ Miklan had growled, and the air was very cold.

Sylvain had stiffened, as if struck, before skirting around the edge of the courtyard to Felix’s side. His eyes never left Miklan’s drawn up gaze as Sylvain wrapped an arm over Felix’s shoulder, tugged him behind his hip to stand between them. Sylvain linked their fingers together, tugging him along with an excuse about Felix’s father looking to speak with them in the parlor, and it wasn’t until they’d passed through the garden gates, Miklan far behind them, that Sylvain let go of Felix’s hand. 

It had been the first time Felix saw Sylvain afraid of anything.

Felix doesn’t mention this now, because there’d be little purpose. There’re few things that wouldn’t survive the cord he and Sylvain keep knotted between them, but Miklan’s name is one of them. Felix can’t remember a time when it wasn’t. 

“You sure you’re not too sore?” Behind him, Sylvain’s boots scrape and tumble over the uneven terrain, noisy. In Faerghus, many learn to sit astride a horse before they can walk. Sylvain is one such unlucky individual, and it shows, to anyone who knows him well enough. He’s brazenly ungraceful on his own two legs. “I can always carry you.” 

Felix can’t spare the attention to turn around and glare at him, so he stares daggers down at his own feet instead. He ignores the telltale ache of overwork and exhaustion in his thighs, the way the base of his spine is a sharp, persistent pain when his hips bend. He ignores it, because Felix would rather eviscerate himself than admit Sylvain is right, sometimes.

“The silent treatment, huh?” Sylvain muses, and for a moment after it truly is silent. It swallows them up in its entirety, the only break the sound of their footsteps over the monastery’s harsh ground. The marked absence of any bird or game had been one of the first things Felix’d noticed about this place. Even all these years later, not even the most fearsome predators dare venture within the confines of what was once the center of their world’s fulcrum. 

They’re halfway up now, and while the fabric and flesh are long gone, the bones scattered across the plateau before the gates poke through the gray grass in little blooms of off-white petals. The bashed in skulls of Edelgard’s demonic beasts lay big as toppled buildings, their dulled brass adornments clinking with the breeze like chimes in an eerie and hollow tinkling. 

“Hey,” Sylvain starts, and Felix knows he isn’t going to like what comes out of his mouth next. “Wanna take bets on who got hot while we were gone?” 

“I don’t know. On a scale of one to ten, how badly do you want to lose your tongue?”

“C’mon,” he continues, ignoring Felix’s very viable and meaningful threat. “My guess is on Bernadetta or Ignatz. Raphael’s a pretty good contender, too, depending on what you’re into. I always thought they had such great potential when we were in school. Now you go.”

“Die,” Felix says.

“Nah, you’d miss me.” Sylvain grunts when he missteps, a spray of gravel tumbling down in his wake. “I guess someone like Lysithea or Leonie might be more your type, anyway.”

Felix whirls to face him in a moment of such tight-jawed rage he thinks his teeth might crack. Sylvain’s but a few steps behind him, and Felix’s toes stop just short of falling off the rock he’s perched on, a head taller than him for one of the first times in all their lives. Sylvain’s smile is quirked and closed-mouth, and Felix hates himself for this, hates the way Sylvain makes him feel both violent and fiercely, stupidly happy beneath it all at once, a slice of tenderness beneath a knife blade. Nobody has the right to evoke such a thing in him. _No one._

“If you think I’m going to listen to you blather on about the men and women you want to bed now that you’re not stuck in the middle of icy nowhere with nothing but your hand for company—” 

“Quiet.”

“Don’t you _dare_ tell me to—”

“ _Shhh_.” Sylvain holds up a gauntleted hand, face shuttering closed. The corners of his mouth go pinched and careful when he glances, sidelong, to meet Felix’s gaze. They both hold still. Above them, the sky churns. The graveyard of Garreg Mach is quiet. 

In the corner of Felix’s vision, the rubble opens its many pairs of eyes, and begins to move. 

His sword’s in his hand before his mind catches up to the movement, the reins dropping from his hands without a second thought. The horses’ ears prick and swivel, stepping in a nervous cadence over the frozen earth, and Felix feels Sylvain’s back hit his as they both swivel to watch the hills come alive around them. He hears the Lance of Ruin hum to uneasy life, a response to Sylvain’s pulse kicking up in his throat. It gives a horrid creak, crackling, warming with the sound of a hundred ancient teeth rattling and grinding together.

The shadows advancing upon them seem to hesitate as the lance’s glow floods over the rocks, like rats shying from torchlight. Felix curses himself for having packed his shield away the night before. Neither he nor Sylvain will go down without a good fight, but as the sun sets the darkness looms longer, and it is impossible to tell just how outnumbered they are. A crick comes from somewhere to their left, the sound spreading, echoing in a circle around them.

Archers, then. Enough to surround them in a wide enough berth and remain within safe firing range. Sylvain’s breathing is still a steady rise and fall through their layers of clothes, and Felix does his best to match the rhythm. He adjusts his grip on his sword’s hilt, raising the blade up in a stance more familiar than anything he’s ever known.

“Well,” Sylvain quips behind him, at a volume raised enough for their new friends to hear loud and clear. “So much for _Alliance hospitality_.” 

Then, quick as they’d descended upon them, the archers skirt back, the muffled movement of clothing an undercurrent to the tension lancing through the air. The ripple only serves to draw Sylvain closer, and Felix sees the pointed edge of his gauntlets in the corner of his vision. As if his arm will serve as any substantial shield while they stand surrounded, neck deep amongst those who’ve never once been their allies. The voice in the back of his head sounds like Glenn, like every man of Faerghus he’s ever known when it says to prepare, draw the first blood before they have time to take your own. Or perhaps that isn’t it—maybe this is just him, boiled down to the very base of his own instincts. A sword doesn’t cease to be a sword once you put it down.

His breath quickens, nerves lighting, and Felix is trying to eye the nearest sniper’s chest piece through the darkness for a gap in the armor when the rustling around them heightens. In the dim light, the ring of archers part, bustling almost in their haste to get out of the way. A lighted orb of fire breaks through their ranks, bobbing with the terrain.

There’s a glint off glass, hushed voices breaking into outright murmurs, and at his back he feels Sylvain release a long-held breath.

Her voice cuts through the dark in her usual no-nonsense way, a familiar rush that almost sends him weak in the knees. It isn’t until she’s calling out that Felix realizes, for all intents and purposes, that in the eyes of their own home their last names are no longer their own, anymore.

“Well I’ll be,” she calls, muffled in cloth and familiarity.

Leonie Pinelli, First Captain of Jeralt’s Mercenaries, has her bow string half-pulled to ready, her face stark and pale with disbelief. “ _Gautier?_ Is that you?”

☾

Felix is watching in his periphery as Dimitri, age six, practices his swings with an invisible lance on the edge of camp.

He hasn’t been watching long. They begin their near final march to their next camp by the Fort’s perimeter at sundown, and Felix’d spent the hours since daybreak crushing herbs into pulpy compresses at Mercedes’ discretion, the milk thistle and elderberries staining the cracks in his fingers a gauzy, bright pink. He’d come away from the preparations, hoping for a moment’s peace before taking lunch—bread crusts and cured pork, today, with a bit of strawberry preserve if they’re lucky. 

Before, Dimitri had been reciting court poetry in the old tongue, which Felix had never been a fan of in the first place. It sat a funny cadence behind his tongue, and he could never quite get the hang of the formal lettering. Hearing it now in the middling peninsula of the Empire only served to make his skin crawl. Felix had hefted his sword out without a second thought, and had long since lost track of the swings. 

Leonie catches Felix’s next strike at thin air with the flat of her boot. The air’s clogged and humid, the morning long since given way to early afternoon. It catches in his lungs when he glances at her, sidelong. 

“Hey,” Leonie chirps.

Felix avoids her eyes, feels the tip of his sword strike earth. He turns around and begins to walk away, but Leonie’s faster on the takedown.

“ _Hey,”_ she says again, stepping into his path. Her hair’s up, swishing in a burnt auburn haze when she moves. “What’re you up to?”

“I’m busy. Move.” 

“Busy…” Leonie cocks her head, looks at him head to toe. “…doing what, exactly?”

“Training. Obviously.”

“You’ve been out here working yourself into a cold sweat for hours, sure. But that’s not exactly what I’d call _training_.”

He squints at her, suspicion gaining traction like a runaway horse in his gut. “Coming from the person who used to say tying her bootlaces was a _dexterity exercise_.” 

“Well,” Leonie cocks her head. “Was I wrong, though?” 

“This is foolish. Goodbye, Leonie.” 

“Now, wait _just_ a minute there—” She feints left, tracking the shift of his weight before he even moves. Felix had learned early on in their friendship she’s infuriatingly good at prediction. Predicting _him,_ specifically. Felix sheaths his sword to avoid her eyes. Behind Leonie’s shoulder Dimitri gives a yell, almost flipping onto his side with the force of his lance thrust.

“I have a request, actually.”

“Great.” Felix fights to keep his eyes on her, and not at Dimitri trying to kick-flip off a tree in Fhirdiad’s training courtyard. “Ask someone else.”

“Sorry, but no can do.” She shakes her head in faux resignation. “It’s gotta be you. Can’t ask anyone else.”

“That sounds…improbable.” 

“Oh, by the _Saints,_ Felix.” Leonie throws up her hands. “Just come on. I swear it’ll make you feel better.”

His unfocused stare quickly sharpens, rounds on her. The white-pink scar cutting through her chin and lower lip is stark, the lines of her tan starker still where her armor usually falls. She’s been out scouting, then. Claude’s always favored her and the mercenaries for cover work. Her nose is sunburned, and she’s as close to outright glaring at him as she’s ever come before.

“What’re you talking about?” he says. “I’m fine.”

Leonie’s eyes roll up. She grabs his collar and starts towing him backwards. “Yeah, sure, whatever you say. Just come on.” 

He shoves at her arm after a few paces, spins around to walk with her so he won’t be pulled along. She’s shaking her head again, muttering something about his stubbornness, or the heat. Felix resists the urge to glance behind them, to see if Dimitri’s still sun-struck grinning, lance in hand. He keeps his eyes on the sway of Leonie’s hair instead—frizzing with the moisture. It’s gotten long. Maybe she’s been growing hers out, too.

She doesn’t lead him far. The mercenary corps had been sequestered to the copse of young oak trees on the far edge of camp, a kind of makeshift guard should any unfortunate Imperial attempt to enter their army through the front. They can see the spot Felix had been standing just down the hill. The shade’s a welcome change from the sun’s open beating on his neck.

“So.” Leonie dips down, slinging her lance up in a wide arch to catch the shaft on the back of her upper arm. “Remember that move you taught me at the Academy?”

Felix lifts a brow, toys with the grip of his sword. He doesn’t draw it yet. “You’ll have to be more specific than that.”

“Oh, y’know, the—” She gesticulates with her free arm, swatting at nothing. “The one—oh, it had a name. A really ridiculous name. Why can’t I remember?” 

Felix’s spine straightens. 

“It’s not ridiculous,” he grits, popping his sword out just enough for the blade to show.

“Aha! So you _do_ remember.”

Now it’s Felix’s turn to roll his eyes. When he sighs it puffs the longer strands of hair falling across his forehead, the shade cool enough to unstick them from his skin. “Yes. I remember.”

“Great!” Leonie lets her lance fall into proper position between both hands. “Can you show it to me again?” 

Felix eyes her. He sets the flesh of his thumb against the silver peeking over his sword scabbard. “Why?”

Leonie hefts the shaft of her lance till the wood sits in the crook of her neck and shoulder, casual and easy. Every muscle in Felix’s body draws in impossibly tighter.

“I want to teach it to my men.” She shrugs.

“Then teach them. You don't need my permission or help.”

“I remember you saying it’s good for ranged defense.”

Felix folds his arms. The ground is soft beneath his feet. He can feel himself sinking. “It is. And?"

“I lost six of them to archers last fight alone, Felix.”

Leonie says this as if Felix is meant to look her in the eye and chastise her for it. _This is war_ , he’s supposed to spit at her boots. _People die. What did you expect?_ But the hard pieced edge he’d reach for is unrecognizable, the sharp points of it sanded and dulled to nothing. Maybe three years ago, he might’ve told her how she should know their world is a cruel, performative place. Maybe, if his father had been kinder, Felix would know what to say when people talk about death.

The silence weighs between them, a stone caught in heavy netting.

“Please,” Leonie says, something tired and desperate seeping through. “Just one time. Then I’ll let you get back to your not-training.”

“You swear it?” 

“Swear it.”

Felix gives a _tch,_ cracking his sword free once again, this time with earnest intent. “Alright.”

Leonie’s face breaks into a smile. “Great.”

The move—or, _Loog’s Tempest Lance,_ as Ashe had deemed appropriate to dub it—relies on unpredictable lateral movement in conjunction with the lance’s placement to confuse the attacker. At its very core, the technique is nothing more than a series of elaborate dodges. The trick relies on incorporating these feints into usual battle tactics, depending upon what the wielder prefers. A lance is the preferred weapon, of course, but Felix has always made do with a sword, and Leonie is one of the few people with little qualms about facing him with a blade.

Her movements are aggressive, fluid in a way many lance wielders struggle to perfect without years of repetition, of wearing themselves with the weight. It’s similar, although not identical, to the way the Professor fights: clinical and precise. There’s no bloodthirsty edge to Leonie’s thrusts, but Felix has seen it out the corner of his eye enough times not to be caught unawares.

They spar, pausing at intermittent lengths to have Felix repeat a certain dodge, or for Leonie to follow his flexion with a steady eye. The goal is always to mislead, to draw the opponents eye away from the direction you wish to move, but they know each other too well enough to pass it off, sometimes, and the number of hits Leonie lands on him with the wooden end of her lance sting with the impact, even through his clothes. It doesn’t help that Dimitri had come to sit on folded knees a few steps away, as if watching their exchange with baited breath, his eyes unblinking and awe-struck.

“Okay,” Leonie says, as Felix rubs an idle thumb over the top of his left shoulder blade. She’d caught him open there three times over. “What’s wrong with you?”

“We’re in the middle of a war, and everyone’s hungry, in case you forgot,” he says, pressing his fingers down until the pain blossoms outwards. “Nothing’s wrong. It just is.”

“No, no, no.” She pulls out the tie of her hair, lets it fall in a bunched up bird’s nest around her face before fixing him with a look as she goes to knot it again, lower on her head. “Don’t think you can _mean-talk_ your way out of this. You’re distracted.”

Felix curls his lip up. The sweat is a comforting cool when he stretches his arm out, testing the pain. “None of us can afford distraction right now. You know that.”

“Okay, fine, not _distracted_ , but—” She sticks the lance blade down, leans her weight against it. “You just seem…off. Not like yourself.” 

“Don’t speak as if you know anything about me,” he says, but the words refuse to bite.

“Hey, careful now.” Leonie twists her mouth around, almost playful. “Keep talking like that and you might actually hurt someone’s feelings one day.”

As if on some sick, trained response, Felix finds himself drawn to Dimitri, now laid out on his stomach in the grass, chin cradled between his hands. He’s looking at Felix, as if awaiting his response. Between the two of them, six-year-old Dimitri and Leonie make quite the mirror.

Felix says nothing—in part because he refuses to give into the whims of his own mind, and in part because there’s nothing to be said. Leonie’s not worth the trouble of evading, her stubbornness as much a virtue as it is a vice. 

She sighs, blowing it out through her lips. “Okay. Wait here.”

Leonie leaves her lance when she turns, strolls over the short distance to where her men are taking a mid-morning lounge, soaking in the first steady days of sun they’ve had in weeks. She calls to one of them, catching the water skin he tosses her with a practiced, worn-in ease. The itch under Felix’s skin is hot, just shy of painful as he waits for her return, and no matter how many times he runs his fingertips over the back of his neck the restlessness refuses to dissipate.

Dimitri’s drawn closer, although he cannot remember when, or how. That’s the funny thing about it all—aside from the obvious strange nature of this Dimitri Felix knows but also doesn’t. The softened, yellowing fall of his hair brushes near Felix’s hip. Felix doesn’t feel it, of course, but he dares a glance down at the top of his head all the same.

Dimitri’s age is harder to pin now—falling sometime after his seventh summer, but before his ninth. Both years he’d sprung up taller, his arms feather-boned and sharp, kneecaps a harsh jut through his linen clothes. The royal seamstresses must’ve thrown a fit, what with the rate of his growth in that stretch of years.

Felix remembers that time for the syrupy droughts of medicine they both drank—Dimitri for his growing pains, Felix for his persistent summer colds. His own had tasted of overripe blackberry, bergamot rind and rotted elderflower, something sweet to take the bitter edge away. Dimitri would take his spoonful, dutiful and straight-faced, then turn around and stick his purpled tongue out with a distasteful _blegh_ , just to make Felix laugh.

A nudge at his elbow. He startles, tenses until he takes in the freckly, toned stretch of Leonie’s arm, two small and bruised peaches resting in the palm extended to him. The skin’s rosy and softly fuzzed, just the right side of ripe. Two miracles.

“How in the world did you get this?”

Leonie’s smile is closed-mouth and crooked.

“I have my ways. Here—” She nudges him again, prompting. “For you. Let’s take a break.”

She starts away from him as soon as one of the fruits falls into his grasp, heading closer to the dapples of shade spilt over the hill like an overturned grain bag. Felix follows her, ignoring the way Dimitri clings to the phantom fall of his clothes, his eyes closed, letting Felix guide him forward. It isn’t encumbering in a physical sense more than feeling as if his insides are slowly being excavated and put on his outside.

Leonie crouches down amongst one of the oak tree’s roots, sitting on her heels and patting the spot next to her. Felix doesn’t sit, but he does, after a grimace and a pause, come to lean at her side against the tree’s dark trunk. 

They’re silent as they eat, Leonie with a voracious efficiency, Felix taking his own nibbling bites, each resulting in his stomach threatening rebellion. The peach is the sweetest thing Felix has had in moons. Even around the bruises it bleeds readily, juice sticky and lukewarm. It smells like the summer kitchens of Fhirdiad, peach pies a royal favorite, when the weather was warm enough. Those peaches, much as this one, must’ve come from the Empire as well.

What little appetite Felix had dissipates, draining right out of him like water from a spigot. The nausea is settling in earnest when Leonie says, still licking her fingers, “I saw Ashe when we were at Gronder. Ingrid, too.”

She may as well have dumped a casket of cold river water over his head. Dimitri’s chin tilts up to look at him, concern evident, eyes like two disks of sky reflecting up at him, and Felix is sick of feeling three seconds away from vomiting his heart out at the drop of a feather, at so much as even the mention of Ingrid’s name.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

Leonie lets her head fall back, her gaze focusing somewhere on the haze of rolling plains in the middle-distance far beyond.

“I don’t know,” she says, frank as ever. “But I think they’re alive. I thought you should know.”

“They could also be dead.”

“Well, yeah. But we take what hope we can get, right?”

Felix lets himself slide down the tree’s length until he hits the rocky soil at its base. Dimitri’s drawn away by something, racing with a sudden urgency away and across the grass on silent footsteps. This time, Felix watches him until he disappears. There are many things he can’t explain. The sense of abandonment that crashes against his shore when Dimitri is no longer in sight counts among them.

“I’m not saying you have to talk about it, just—” Leonie continues. “I’m here, y’know. If you do.” 

Without a word, he passes the rest of his picked at peach over to her. Leonie finishes it in six ravenous, noisy bites that stir the sickness in Felix’s belly anew. 

Overhead, the dark speckles of starlings flit over the cloudless sky, a single undulating shadow. The breeze is weak and high, just like the afternoon Ingrid was hefted onto the back of her first pegasus. The beast was old and flea-bitten gray, its feathered hocks and fetlocks scrubbed to a pearlescent, golden-white. Slow and _thunder-proof_ as the stable master called her. Perfectly safe for the next-in-lines to risk the fragile bones of their necks riding—but it was Ingrid alone that showed the most promise, the undeniable ability for it in the simple way she held the complicated, looping sets of reins. Felix had been jealous, if only for the way Dimitri had marveled at her stance in the saddle, how the smooth of her fingers looked so natural in the tangled, wispy cloud of pegasus mane.

 _Ingrid._ Felix bites down on her name between the cut of his teeth. A disobedient hound refusing to release the duck long after its neck has snapped, and it’s stupid, he knows, this clinging, snarling refusal.

 _“Don’t fall!”_ Dimitri calls, up on the tips of his toes, stretching as far into the sky as he can. All Felix’d needed to do was blink for Dimitri to return to him again. There’s no response to Dimitri’s calling here, but the memory is like a rhythm in Felix’s head, swaying and careful. The beating of wings muffled her response, her excitement in the summer air like a beating ray of sun against their upturned faces.

 _“Don’t worry.”_ Ingrid had grinned. _“I won’t!”_

☾

“Ingrid…” Sylvain scrubs a hand through the ruff of his hair. He’s frustrated. “Let’s talk about this.”

The fire’s guttering in Ingrid’s childhood bedroom on the far west side of the Galatea estate house when they sneak their way in, the snow still blustering off their clothes. He and Sylvain arrived just minutes before, their horses still puffing steam in the stables below. Their time runs shorter even as the snow melts into their hair. They still have their traveling cloaks buttoned on. Ingrid prods at the flame without looking up, trying very hard to appear busy.

“There’s nothing to discuss,” she says, muted. 

“Then why aren’t your bags packed?” Felix crosses his arms. The sidelong look Sylvain gives him borders upon painful.

Ingrid’s mouth twists an uncomfortable line. She has always been exceptionally bad at lying when it comes between the three of them. Her hair is chopped short and limp, falling into the hollow of her cheekbones. Galatea is starved as the rest of them. 

“My armor and bags are still with the blacksmith,” Ingrid says. “I can’t exactly pack anything without them first.”

“We leave at dawn, Ingrid, there’s no time for this,” Sylvain starts, the edge beginning to creep into his voice.

He’s right. They don’t have time. The Margrave’s no doubt taken note of Sylvain’s silence from the northern front, and even then he is no fool. Felix can’t help but wonder how many bread crumbs they’ve dropped in their preparations to flee, how many of them Sylvain’s father has found and pondered in ill-kept silence.

There’s never enough time. Especially for something as foolish as this.

“I’ve already apologized for not being ready,” Ingrid says, abandoning her place by the fire with a swift slide of her boots, the fire still a pathetic whimper. “I don’t know what else you want me to—”

“ _Pointless_ ,” Felix mutters, the word slipping from him, almost without notice. The same cannot be said of Ingrid. Her eyes meet his and they are a shielded battlement against him. 

“What did you say?”

“I said this is a pointless conversation,” Felix says, sliding the words to Ingrid at knifepoint. “ _You’ve_ already made up your mind, haven’t you?” 

“ _Felix_ ,” Sylvain warns. 

“No.” He grabs Sylvain’s concern out of the air, intent on strangling it right then and there. “You think coddling her is going to work? _Really?_ ”

“I wasn’t—”

“No, Sylvain.” Ingrid goes very still, turns to show them the hollow of her spine, her eyes on the thin carpet blanketing the stone floor. “He’s right.”

It’s like hearing the stampede before it crests over the hill you stand beneath. There is the sound, the pounding of noise, but no way to prepare for the impact. Sylvain strides over to where Ingrid stands by her old vanity, a gift from Felix’s parents when she was six, the wood darkened and worn.

“Ingrid,” Sylvain says, low and tight. His hands raises, as if to touch her elbow, before he stops, halfway there. “You know it isn’t safe here.”

“This isn’t about me, Sylvain.” She drops her voice down even softer, as if this isn’t a sentiment Felix hasn’t heard her say so a hundred times before. As if he doesn’t already see the horse long dead from its beating.

“I thought you of all people would understand.” She continues looking at the swirled grain of the vanity’s wood. Sylvain finally does let his hand fall between her shoulder blades.

“I’m sorry, Sylvain,” she says. She doesn’t so much as look at Felix. “I don’t know if I—if I can leave the Kingdom like this.”

“Please,” Felix snorts, shoves all the derision he can into that one little word. “Faerghus is done for. The Empire’s already taken a knife to it and they will take and take until we’re nothing but bones. Soon they’re going to run out of things to cut up and—”

The fist Ingrid slams against the vanity shakes the whole room. “It is _not_ over.”

Sylvain’s hand flinches away. Whether her shoulders quake with the impact or with cold, Felix does not know.

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” she says. The words don't shake.

The silence that follows is deafening. Not so much as a breath passes between them.

“We’ve all heard the rumors,” Ingrid half-whispers, but she may as well be shouting, what with the way her voice cracks. “If there is even…a _chance_ he is alive, then I—”

“That’s nothing but a fool’s hope and you know it,” Felix grinds out between his teeth. “If you stay here you’ll die, just like the rest of them. Just like the boar.”

A pause. Sylvain’s eyes have fallen to the floor between them, his profile still and blank as a portrait hung only half-commissioned. Ingrid only half-turns her face, the fury a palpable shade of icy blue in her irises. “I would rather die a hopeful fool with His Highness than a coward for the Alliance that abandoned us.”

Felix lunges for her. 

He’s quick. Felix always has been, as a point of pride, faster than his friends, when before his Crest had presented and all he had was being small and light and surefooted. He’s nimble, and dexterous, capable of running twice the length of a field in the time it took their classmates to run one. 

None of that matters anymore. Ingrid is faster. 

She gets in two good hits before they’re ripped apart—the first when she catches him square with a punch above his breastbone. Felix’s breath is a wheezing cough pulled from his body. He feels more than sees himself grabbing the collar of her shirt, yanking it back to smash his head against her teeth, and the next hit she gets in is a long, scraping scratch of her blunt fingernails around his scalp, all the way to the shell of his ear.

She screams something. Felix screams something back.

It’s over almost as soon as it began, because then Sylvain’s there, the bulk of him between them, trying to hold Felix’s arms pinned above his head. The pinch of his mouth’s sad and angry and disappointed, and Ingrid’s glaring over his shoulder, huffing, as if she’d like to tear Felix’s throat out with her teeth. There’s a split in her lower lip, blooming red. She’s bleeding.

“Let go of me,” he growls, into the heat of Sylvain’s breath above him. They’re almost nose to nose.

“That’s enough, Felix.” 

“I said let _go_ —”

“Just _wait outside_. Go get the horses ready and wait for us.” Sylvain’s hold loosens, but remains tight enough to hold if Felix throws himself at him. He’s being gentle. Suddenly Felix wants to punch him, too. 

“Hey,” Sylvain whispers this time, only just loud enough for Felix to hear. “ _Felix._ Look at me.”

He does, after a beat. After the blood stops pounding like a war drum in his ears. Felix realizes he’s quivering, his teeth near chattering with the current of fury coursing through him, like lightning wired under his jaw. There’s a faint trickle of something wet down his neck. He must be bleeding, too.

Felix looks at Sylvain. Looks and looks for what feels the first time in years, wondering how he’d never noticed the dusting of splotchy freckles just over the bridge of his nose and across his eyelids. How funny. How stupid he looks.

Sylvain who, beneath the bravado and the libido is nothing if not pragmatic. Ingrid, who has always believed an honorable death meant an honorable life. There was never a way this was going to work. 

“Please,” Sylvain breathes. “Let me talk to her alone.”

Felix says nothing. He sighs heavy into the liminal space between them, the tight string pulled to nothing but bare thread strung together, connecting them, tugging harder. It could break any day now—and maybe it’s only be a matter of time before it does. Felix doesn’t know. It’s as if the past five years have been learning, and unlearning, relearning again only to find out he really knows nothing at all.

Sylvain’s hold on his wrists loosen. He lets go, and Felix wrenches away from him. When he turns and slams the door behind him, he doesn’t so much as glance to see if Ingrid’s lip is still bleeding, if she’s still staring at him as if _he’s_ the one who ripped their world in two. 

Before he’d learned to control it, when they were barely five, Felix’s crest had activated as he’d aimed a slap at Ingrid’s cheek. There’d been a swish, like fire igniting, as he’d raised his flattened palm aimed for the frizzled crown of her head. It’d been over something foolish, as it almost always was, but they both ended up lectured within an inch of their lives for something else entirely.

Because Felix hadn’t hit Ingrid—he’d hit Dimitri. Knocked one of his loose teeth clear out when he came to stand between them. They’d watched it bounce across the rug of the Galatea sitting room, squabble all but forgotten. They watched as it caught on the packed, thistly fibers but a few strides away, all their collective sets of eyes wide as the moon. 

They’d stood there, transfixed, until a thin stream of blood dribbled from Dimitri’s lips. Everything had descended into chaos quickly—one of the servants came in at the commotion, shrieked and darted off for help as the rest of them stood in shell-shocked, fascinated silence as Dimitri brought a questioning finger to probe at the new, pulpy gap in his gums. Then Ingrid’s father entered, followed by her mother, then two of her brothers and then Glenn was there, all of them near struck-dumb at the sight. The crown prince and his two most loyal and loving crib-mates, still in their nightclothes in the morning light, peering at a tooth as if it were a nugget of gold.

Ingrid blamed Felix. Felix blamed Ingrid. And Dimitri was adamant it was nobody else’s fault but his own, for getting in the way.

 _You were almost right, boar,_ Felix finds himself realizing, as he takes the servants’ passage back down to the stables, pulls his hood up tight and low over his head. The wind greets him with a chill that pierces straight to the bone, and even in the courtyard he remembers for its wilting peony beds and elm trees, the winter has warped it to something far beyond recognition. Warped them all. It’s a second realization that hits Felix as he pulls on his gloves, touches along the side of his neck. It comes away tacky and deep red-black against his glove. He thinks of Ingrid’s lip and doesn’t feel sorry. He can’t remember the last time they apologized to each other.

He knows which window is hers—fourth from the western tower, second from the top. The light there is guttering. Felix cannot see the shadows inside.

Because Dimitri hadn’t been wrong, in a way. Even if Felix and Ingrid _were_ magnanimous in everything, even if their friendship hadn’t been born from proximity and mutual admiration, from loving the same people at the same time—there was always that thing, the one wedge jammed between them that kept their hearts so inextricably apart. Even now, as they both stand on the same side, there’s a jagged line carved through the stone that keeps them from crossing it. 

Some things don't change, no matter how hard one pulls, no matter how desperately they want it. 

He and Ingrid could never agree when it came to Dimitri.

Felix stares up at the felt black, starless sky, at the window and its distant light. Inside, Ingrid is pushing Sylvain away and Sylvain is pushing back, a wave beating back against the shore, and Dimitri’s rotting away in the ground, or tearing someone’s throat out, sinking his teeth into the pink of their bones still warm and steaming white in the air. They’re watching the rockslide come down the mountain but none of them so much as flinch. None of them so much as blink as it barrels ever downwards. What is there to run from, when the thing you love is what crushes you? Where is there to run when the path is all you’ve ever known?

But Dimitri will never be their king. He will never ride them into Fhirdiad, silver-crowned and gilded in blue, the azure sky bending around him as Felix once thought it would. There will be no more broken baby teeth on the rug or hours spent in the river, wrestling in the water till their skin prunes, their knees blackened with bruises from the bank. Felix knows, in some tucked away part of him, that Ingrid is feeling this, too. In that regard, they always were the same.

Still, it changes nothing—the thinking of it, the commiserating and festering. He itches for his sword, to hold the simple weight of it like an anchor over his body. The night is still enough that all the sound Felix hears is that of the Empire pounding their pestle with a sound like a bell, like a scream. That’s the terrifying thing about war: even in the silence, you can hear it.

The stables lanterns are still burning, the few horses remaining all bedded down for the night. Sylvain’s bay mare huffs a hot breath against his palm, the snip of her muzzle a splotch of red-tinted white in the burning light. She noses his fingers apart in search of food, and it isn’t until she sets her head against his chest that Felix closes his eyes and lets himself breathe.

☾

At first light they cross into the Faerghus Dukedom through a road Felix’s never been down before, coated in brambles, overgrown with frosted ferns and the dripped, dirty remains of last night’s snow. An old courier’s path, thick with forest. They pass through it and the Galatea estate disappears beneath the dead vines, the frail outline of it covered so quickly by the tangle of trees.

Felix doesn’t expect he’ll ever see it again.

They emerge from the other side into the pass of mountains rising up from Charon’s eastern valleys blushed pink with alpenglow, jutting from the earth like great, blackened notches of a spine. Sylvain’s talked the whole way as if, surely, were he to shut his mouth, they might both simply turn around and go back. Felix doesn’t miss the way he lingers at the final limb of trees breaking the path apart, how he almost halts his horse at the cusp of the woods. It doesn’t last long. Sylvain hurries the moment along with his own blathering, and Felix, for the first time in a long time, doesn’t threaten him to quiet upon penalty of bodily harm.

The war rages. They turn true south, dig their heels in hard against their horses’ ribs, and begin to run.

☾

The dreams start out simple enough.

They’re amalgamous, at first, enough so to be about most anything. The colors are vague, soft and indistinct. It feels very much like when he was small, too short to see over the windowsill in the Fraldarius estate, how Glenn would wrap them up in the thick, Daphnel-spun curtains and they’d sit in the middle of them, a fortress of fabric, the outside world a blurry haze of white winter light through the glass.

A place. A courtyard. The sway of motion beneath him. A horse, a field of golden wheat blushed red by the sun, a lulling ocean. A hand creeping up to hold his own. Felix awakens in the early dawn from these dreams feeling for the pit in his chest beneath the blankets, as if he might find the source of pain there as a tangible hole straight through his ribs.

It doesn’t remain this way for long.

Shapes sharpen. The sky churns a scarred, milky blue, and the feeling morphs towards peaceful breathlessness. The moment after the horse throws you off: you hit the dirt, the air leaves you, abandons you to gasping on your curled up, bruising shoulder, coughing up nothing, taking in dust. You stand. Six strides away, the horse has its neck bent, mouthfuls of grass slobbering its bit bright green. You can’t even recall how you fell in the first place.

Three weeks after Dimitri appears, Felix stops remembering his dreams. He forgets them, but the same feeling remains—a hollowness belied in heat, the absence of words, the presence of something he thought he’d lost. He knows something has happened, but his mind won’t tell him _what._

 _If you wait long enough,_ his mother used to say, her hands like cracked porcelain with scars of Thunder as they guided his own to rest, folded neatly over his nightgown, his dreams overshadowed by the nightmares in their wake. _Sometimes, they’ll come back to you._

At first, Felix keeps his eyes shut in the aftermath, focuses on the movement of air in his lungs, the rhythmic push and pull. A part of him wants to slip back under, grab whatever tendril of that softer world that he can and run. Another part of him hopes that day will never come. Because what Felix does know is that he always wakes from these dreams in tears—wet and silent ones that soak into his hands where they cup beneath his cheek. He wipes the dampness from his face in belligerent-bloated silence, the feeling that brought them about having long since vacated him, ripped away.

He wakes from them and if Sylvain’s still in bed, Felix nuzzles close, climbs on top of him and buries his face against his neck. His searching hands grapple in the darkness until he finds it, running the blunt of his fingernails over the scar that eats up the left-half of Sylvain’s chest—a gruesome riddling of pocked-pink skin that wraps from navel to the lower notches of his back. Sylvain runs his palms up Felix’s spine even half-asleep rumbling, and Felix waits, not patiently, until Sylvain opens his eyes to press his mouth against his throat.

“Well _good morning_ to you, too,” Sylvain whispers against his temple, and Felix doesn’t make a sound. He bites down on the soft of Sylvain’s earlobe, scrubs his forehead against the day-old scruff of his cheek and pushes a rough hand down between them. He grabs at Sylvain through his clothes, the curving arch of his hand aching, grinding down until Sylvain’s fumbling to grab his wrist away, hissing more with pain than pleasure.

“Hey.” Sylvain struggles to pull back far enough, to look him in the face. Their noses bump, and it takes everything Felix has not to shy away, not to squeeze his eyes shut. He looks at Sylvain’s mouth, the chapped, scarred bow of his lip. A girl had punched him there when he was seventeen. She’d been wearing her mother’s emerald teardrop ring. The scar has never faded.

Then he’s thinking of Sylvain kissing her and it’s like the ugly thing taking shape inside him snarls.

“Felix. Slow down.” Sylvain casts it out to the scant air between their mouths. “ _Hey_. It’s alright.”

 _Please,_ he wants to say _. I don’t know what’s wrong. What’s happening to me. I’m scared. I’m scared._

All that comes out of his mouth is breath after breath, rustling the loose fall of his hair caught between Sylvain’s fingers. And then Sylvain is there, everywhere, all around him, and Felix stops fighting the urge to shut his eyes to it. Their foreheads touch, and he knows Sylvain’s gaze is on him, searching, imploring.

_What have you been burying? How can I help make it stop?_

“Talk to me,” is what he says, like the words might break if he dares handle them with too rough a touch.

And this is where if Felix had a snide comment, he’d say it. He’d sink it into the hollow of Sylvain’s clavicle, into the bone, let it fall there so he’d know it without the words. But Felix doesn't have a comment, doesn’t have much of anything to say. The dreams take everything he has to keep his head above water, to keep the cold from dragging him under each time he takes a single, aching gasp of frozen air. 

He knows it is an allowance, when he presses his lips to Sylvain’s to steal his breath. He does it once, twice, crushes the tender thing blooming in his chest back into the sharp jut of his spine. He kisses him and it tastes like the burnt cinders of his magic, wind off a horse’s neck, the closest thing to home Felix may ever have for the rest of his life.

“Touch me,” he says against the scar of Sylvain’s lips.

Beneath him, Sylvain is very still, his bare chest hot beneath Felix’s fingers carving welts into his abdomen. His hands, where they brace Felix’s hip and thigh, curl in closer, adjusting his grip just a breath higher. The indecision lies in his closed mouth, the way he looks at Felix with dark eyes, as if he cannot truly see him through the blue half-light. Sylvain’s a burning ember, the kind that scalds the skin in the palm of your hands, and the traitorous part of Felix reminds him: this is why they clamor for him. This is why their handprints cover his heart, his chest, his mouth _. In this regard, you are not special._

Felix steals another shallow breath as a kiss against the corner of Sylvain’s lower lip, pulling him closer. The bulk of his muscles flex under Felix's body, and the coiling of energy winding through Sylvain's abdomen is warm and tense beneath him, tentative to touch.

He’s also hard.

Felix rolls down against him. Sylvain’s breath jumps, flinches as he inhales. Felix does this twice more, lets his whole weight fall and grind against him until Sylvain’s grip tightens, as if to clutch him closer, and Felix knows he’s won. His hair’s a tangle of black shuttering them in as Sylvain pushes his hips up, his exhale shaky when it meets Felix’s mouth. When they kiss Felix tastes the blackberry mead from the night before behind his teeth and swallows the groan Sylvain gives him, open-mouthed, quiet, and so clearly wanting.

The sound roiling a vicious churn in his chest isn’t victory when Felix dives below the blanket, Sylvain’s spit sticking to his tongue. He remembers, suddenly, how when the ewes would lamb there were always those few not strong enough to stand, those that would never survive the first moon of suckling, how the shepherds would smother them if the rams didn’t first.

It was one of the first lessons Felix ever learned: weakness suffocates, strength blooms. There are some things that, once gone, do not come back.

His hands shake when he falls between Sylvain’s legs, his eyes shut to the indigo tint of light through the blanket’s fabric, and the world is blue and dark and unbearably hot when Felix takes Sylvain into his mouth, and lets himself drown.

☾

He’s going to ignore it.

Felix decides this on the morning he rolls off Sylvain to the sound of Dimitri’s laughter right beside his ear. It rattles him to consciousness like the crack of a whip against his skin, a snap that sends his whole body flinching and on edge before it’s gotten the chance to awaken. In some ways it’s a saving grace Sylvain has just exited to fetch them fresh water—but in other ways Felix wonders if he’d have less trouble acting as if nothing’s amiss if he weren’t left alone with—

Dimitri. The ghost _of_ Dimitri.

He hates the word—each of them individually, and even worse when put together. They crawl under his skin and try to dig deeper, so deep they burrow little holes into his bones for the wind to pass through. One day he’ll whistle with the hollowness at even the slightest gust of wind.

Dimitri giggles again. Felix opens his eyes. 

Dimitri’s younger, this time around. Not more than four autumns would’ve passed since his birth. The picture Felix holds of him is blurry and indistinct in his own memory. That young, there is hardly anything else but Dimitri for him to remember. Many of his waking moments had been ones they’d spent together. And _here_ in the present waking world, he is more alive and vivid than ever.

He’s lying splayed out on his back, looking at something or someone far above. His nightclothes are a cream and blue set, tapered in perfect length to the short, lean length of his limbs. It had been a difficult harvest that year. His hair’s cut short, curling into little wisps of light gold at his temples, the complexion of his round cheeks ruddy with exertion and cold. There’s one scar, just on the underside of his left jawbone, where he’d caught himself on one of the table edges in the nursery while learning to walk. Felix had marveled at it, his mouth agape and eyes wide at the thin little mark it’d left.

Almost nobody knows the first wound their sovereign prince ever received is from the sharp edge of a low sitting room table. And now, Felix supposes, nobody else ever will.

Felix who, watching Dimitri catch his breath as he laughs at an unheard joke, or some other unseen ridiculousness, is left wondering what kind of cruel trick the world even has left to give him.

☾

Felix’s thirteenth birthday, the last one they ever spend together, is unseasonably warm. 

_The Goddess smiles upon us this moon,_ the priests say, dressed in their cream and gray robes early, smelling of burnt sage and the waxed resin the Church uses to keep their flame wicks burning long and bright into the night. _May her sun shine ever brighter upon your fields._

Felix cares little of the Goddess or their fields when he and Dimitri sneak away from dinner to the training yard. It’d been simple really—a communication they didn't need words for, just the grasp and tug of Dimitri’s hand around his own beneath the table and they were off, excusing themselves with such brevity nobody had time to assign them a guide, or a guard. Or _Ingrid._ It would’ve mattered little, no matter the tactic—the Fraldarius estate is Felix’s home, and the hours he and Glenn had spent mapping it, squeezing through the nooks and alcoves to find shortcuts, was not knowledge to be trifled with.

As soon as they’re out the view of the front doors, Felix reaches for Dimitri’s hand once more and they _run_. There is a thing that roils in Felix’s stomach when he does this now, as it never had before. He doesn’t know how to name the feeling, just as he hadn’t years ago. It’d spilled into him like ink: a billow of color trickling down to take root in the pit of his chest. They don’t let their hands separate until the chilled warmth of the sun hits them, like a splash of water to the face as the doors to the inner courtyards swing open.

The sky’s a bluebird’s wing, speckled in white, and the sun is not a bleached yellow beneath the clouds but brimming around the trees, red and broiling as the bare branches slice it to pieces. The days have begun to lengthen again, little by little, but even now their hours of light remain brief so far north. Felix intends to take full advantage of the time they do have.

Still, they don’t run, confident in the idea that they have escaped. That nobody will think to look for them here. Together they walk, the air warm enough not to puff around their breath. Felix steals looks at Dimitri through the curtain of his hair falling loose from his braid. Glenn had taught him how to tie and fold it back away from his eyes, but Felix’s hair's so silken and straight as their mother’s was it slips within hours, long enough to brush near mid-back. It was an annoyance. It got stuck in his mouth when he slept and snagged on his armor with painful pinches. He’d cut it soon. He’d already decided so.

Dimitri’s looking back. Felix’s eyes dart away. In a moment of rash embarrassment he pulls the rest of his hair free, shakes it out as the horses do their manes in the mud. Dimitri laughs, flips Felix’s hair back over his shoulder as it falls in a crinkled black wave.

“ _Luschka._ ” Dimitri’s voice wavers even as he smiles, catching himself when he slips into the nicknames they’re supposed to have left behind in childhood. Felix doesn’t mind though—so long as it’s Dimitri. “Maybe we should go back. It is your party, after all. Everyone wishes to see you.”

Felix shrugs. “I can see them later.” He puts the hair ribbon in his mouth, silken and cerulean for the occasion, and bundles up his hair into a tangled knot at the back of his head. Glenn and their mother would be appalled. “And I want you to show me that move Sir Dominic taught you.” 

_I’d rather be with you, anyway,_ is something he might’ve said, were he four years younger and blissfully unaware of how it sounds. 

“Oh!” Dimitri’s face is alight, honeyed gold when the bloodied sun hits it. They pass through the gate into the outer courtyards, the training yard a flat expanse of packed dirt just beyond. “The one I mentioned in my letter?”

Felix nods, humming an affirmative response. His stomach is dancing all over his insides again. He waits an additional moment for the feeling to pass before opening his mouth, clearing the voice crack lurking there.

“I want to try it on Sylvain and see what happens.” 

Dimitri peers at him for a beat, his mouth hitching up at the corners. “You speak as if you’ve managed to land a point against him since last autumn.”

“Shut up.” Felix pushes at him and Dimitri stumbles, but they’re both grinning when their eyes meet. “As if _you_ ’ve managed it either!”

His formal wear is stiff-sleeved as Felix rolls his shoulders, peeling his meticulously stitched outer coat off and dropping it, without ceremony, over the rail.

“That’s why I need your help,” he throws over his shoulder, making for the modest weapon stockade they keep within the house grounds.

“You don’t need my assistance, Felix. I know you can do it.”

“That isn’t—” Felix, decidedly, does not flush at the words. “He’ll expect it from you, because you’ve been in training the past month. But if you show _me_ —” 

“—he’ll never see it coming. I see,” Dimitri says. “The element of surprise, right?”

“Exactly.”

“Still…” Dimitri sheds his own long coat, embroidered in patterns of cream swan feathers and spring crescent moons against a midnight sky, sewn with care around the lapel and sleeves. He unwraps the firm-knit scarf where it falls in a loop around his neck, folds it and the coat in a neat line together, and sets it beside Felix’s. “I’m not sure I’m quite good enough yet to teach you. I don’t wish to…make a mistake.” 

Felix ignores this. Dimitri must _know_ Felix is going to ignore this.

 _What if I hurt you?_ is the question Dimitri no longer asks, because he knows how it incenses him like nothing else. In their younger years it had been near insulting, something Felix would feel the tears burn in his eyes for the sake of how it hurt. But now the anger that once sat there had been replaced with something new, something closer to confusion. Bafflement.

 _You can’t hurt me,_ is what he doesn’t know how to say. He can’t simply lay out all the pieces of his heart on the floor, point to each one with an explanation, a puzzle they might pick apart together. _Nothing you could do would make me leave your side. Here’s why._

Felix watches him from the corner of his eye as he retrieves their lances, his awareness of Dimitri as he fiddles with his cuffs one that Felix’d never possessed before. Someone had cut his hair recently—the fringe is a clean line of dirty gold along the nape of his neck, just brushing the dark, high collar of his shirt. He’s grown into his clothes more since they last saw each other at the new year, filled out the places they used to hang loose at his chest and arms. Felix himself is stuck somewhere in the in-between, his frame still small and strung tight over his bones. _Lean as a foxhound in winter,_ as the King had said earlier that afternoon, clapping Rodrigue on the back with a resounding smack.

It’d be easy, for anyone not used to the looking, to mistake how he finds himself staring at Dimitri as envy, or jealousy.

It isn’t.

“Here.” Felix gives the lance a twirl in his right hand, tossing Dimitri the one in his left. He catches it, easy as breathing.

“If I best you,” Felix offers. “Show it to me.” 

Dimitri’s smile is wobbly, unsure of itself. He stretches up onto his toes, twisting his torso to lengthen the muscle as memory and routine tells him to. He is so tall it borders upon foolish. 

“And If _I_ best _you_?”

“I don’t know.” Felix lays the lance shaft against his back, holding his arms in place behind him. “I chose my prize. Pick anything you like.”

Dimitri thinks for a moment, then hums a long sustained note that wavers in the air. Felix tries not to smile, in spite of himself.

“Oh, I know,” Dimitri nods, clearly pleased with himself. “If I win, you come out to the spring hunt with us this year.”

Felix’s nose crinkles. The hunt isn’t what he’s opposed to—it’s the horses. “Never mind, pick something else.” 

“You said anything,"Dimitri laughs. “I thought I was being reasonable!”

All Felix does is glare, his eyes narrowing down at Dimitri’s smile stubbornly refusing to falter in the face of his intimidation. Because it’s not as if Felix can _argue_ with that.

“Fine,” he says, eventually. “But only if I ride behind you.”

Dimitri’s eyes find the ground between them, smile faltering as if he’s suddenly questioning its propriety there on his face. Felix tugs at the high collar of his shirt, the thick material cloying warm beneath his chin.

“Alright,” Dimitri says, the jay-feathered blue of his eyes flitting, his ears red with the sun leaking through the twilight. “We swear upon it, then?”

“Obviously,” Felix says, once he can breathe again. He holds his thumb out. “Swear it.”

Dimitri doesn’t hesitate when he reaches up to press the pads of their thumbs flush together. Even without the blood mingling between their fingers, Felix almost jolts at his touch. It’d been years since they’d done this, a practice meant to be kept buried in boyhood. And yet Felix cannot help but lean into Dimitri’s thumb, the pressure both indelible and true. Such a small, simple thing, when Dimitri’s eyes rise to meet his own.

“Swear it,” Dimitri echoes, soft and sure.

For a singular, overwhelming moment, Felix wishes this is what the whole rest of their lives could be: no parties, or hunts, or kingship, no hours spent inking lines of calligraphy to parchment. Just this. Just them, the training grounds, and the silent understanding. 

Felix falls into stance on instinct, feeling the ghost of Miklan’s brandistock nudging his elbows lower, a correction he knows how to make now like the back of his hand.

A brow lifts past the chop of his bangs. Dimitri stretches his arms out till the joint cracks. “You don’t want to warm-up first?” 

Felix grins. “You need a warm-up?”

“Well…” Dimitri turns his gaze down, but even in his duplicity he is nothing but brutally honest, lifting his eyes half a second early before he bears down on him, the wood of their lances clattering in such a way to make Felix’s jaws snap together, trembling. He barks out a laugh that is only half-battle cry, twisting left to take Dimitri’s lance with him when he swings downwards. 

Dimitri is strong—stronger than many of their knights, stronger than their instructors who gave him wooden swords only to watch them splinter against thin air with the force of his strikes. Dimitri is strong, agile in the way a mountain lion leaps from boulder tops, and the way he holds a lance is nothing short of second nature, the lines of his palms meant for holding things reaching and sharp. But Felix is fast—and he has his Crest, too. _That_ is where they intersect. 

They clash back and forth for a time, the upper-hand something they toss like a ball between them before Dimitri finally knocks a point against Felix’s shoulder, slips a boot beneath his feet and sends them both tumbling to the earth as Felix yanks his long collar in retaliation. He goes down with a soft _oof,_ and they’re a tossup of boney limbs upended in the dust. Dimitri’s breath is only just shy of quickened, his lance driven into the soft, sandy ground beneath Felix’s left ear. Felix wishes he could hide how heavily his chest rises and falls.

A throat clears. They both startle, whipping their heads in tandem to the entrance.

“A worthy strike, Your Highness,” Glenn commends with a nod, smile twisting around the words with amusement. His lean against the rail suggests he’d been there for a time, enough so to make himself comfortable. His previously pinned up braid slinks over his shoulder, loose. “Well done.”

The speed with which he and Dimitri straighten is astonishing, even to himself. Dimitri’s ears grow ever more red with each glance Felix dares try to steal as they stand and brush the grainy mess from their clothes.

“Come now,” Glenn says, pushing himself off the rail, meandering over. “Don’t stop on my account. I was looking forward to seeing what Sir Dominic had taught you while I was away, Your Highness.”

Dimitri’s bending to retrieve Felix’s dropped lance a stride away, his face lighting at the words. “Truly, Lord Glenn?”

Felix tries to pull Dimitri’s lance from the ground, only to find that he cannot. Glenn reaches out and lends his strength, and with their combined effort they manage to unearth it.

“Of course, _My Lord Dimitri_.” Glenn nods, shaking the dirt from the wooden lance blade. Dimitri scowls, his mouth a wobbly line falling from his chin. Felix rolls his eyes. 

“But, looks as if you’ll be joining us for the hunt this year, dear one.” Glenn ruffles the top of Felix’s head with his spare hand. “If I’d known this is all it would take I’d have asked Dimitri to challenge you sooner.”

Felix bats his hand away, now wearing a scowl of his own. “Not if I refuse to go!" 

“But you _swore_ on it!” Glenn says, laughing, at the same moment Dimitri says the exact same, his tone a considerably darker shade of upset. In a moment of desperation, Felix grabs for the lance still in Glenn’s hand, grasping at nothing but thin air when Glenn pulls it back at the last second.

He does this thrice more, Felix jumping and dodging around him in vain. He gets close once, the shaft slipping through his fingers before Glenn swivels once again, form impeccable, lance out of reach. Felix’s hair is a sticky, sweated blanket to the back of his neck as it falls from its tie in earnest. He’s losing his breath. 

“ _Fine,_ I’ll _go_ , okay, I didn’t mean it,” he whines, eyes casting over to where Dimitri is giving it his best go at keeping a straight face. He’s failing quite miserably. 

“Good.” Glenn gives a half-smile, tosses the lance underhand in one effortless turn of his wrist. Felix scrambles to catch it in time, before the balance tips it over in the air. “If you cannot keep your oaths you shall make a poor knight, when the time comes.”

“I wasn’t—” he begins to protest again, snapping his mouth shut when he spots of soft light in Glenn’s eyes.

Felix knows he’s glowering, the corners of his mouth pulling down all the same. Dimitri finally cracks, his laugh a good-natured huff when he presses his forearm to Felix’s own, strong and firm, warm with exertion. Whatever annoyance had been rolling in Felix’s stomach quiets at his touch, and when Dimitri offers him a real smile, a little crooked and all teeth, Felix cannot help but give his own in return.

“Well, then,” Glenn says, muffled as he goes to retrieve a lance of his own. “I believe it’s been a while since I’ve faced you both together.”

The lance is weightless in his brother’s grip, as Felix has always thought it to be. Even held in his off-hand, his right, Glenn manages to make the swing he tests the weapon’s weight with smooth and precise. Felix’s whole body coils with the movement in anticipation, in excitement.

Glenn nods at them each in turn. “Felix. Dimitri. At your ready.”

It’s with a single shared look that Felix knows Dimitri is just as thrilled as he is, and the stances they jump to fall into are strung fast and ready. Dimitri never smiles as big as when they spar with Glenn, when he knows there’s a challenge to be had. It’s in their blood—where there is a fight, there is a hunger. To be of the north is to carve yourself from the fallow earth, bloodied knuckle over knuckle. To teach your children to turn themselves to stone, too.

 _“You’ve all still much to learn.”_ Ingrid’s father had said as Ingrid pinched Felix’s boney waist with her thumb behind his back. Her father’s eyes are in her head, two flat waves of emerald water when she smiles. Felix flicks his forefinger against her ribs.

 _“But you are young, yet,"_ the Count had continued, not noticing their silent bickering. He spoke much the way a huntsman would to soothe a fickle pup. Felix doesn’t know what weight those words hold until years later, they begin to crush him.

But right now, they have time. An endless amount. It falls from his hands and holds out, stretching on far past the corners of his family’s training yards, far past whatever he can see. Felix feels the tug of this certainty in the way Dimitri speaks his name, in the how Glenn’s lance meets his, as it’s meant to until they’re both old and creaking. Felix has no reason to believe anything else.

And Felix is so caught up in trying to hold Dimitri’s smile in the corner of his eye, he regrets to notice much of anything else.

☾

“Care for some company?”

Claude’s voice materializes out of the darkness of the trees on the edge of camp before he strides bodily into view. He’s dressed down, the complicated intricacies of his armor shed for the plain clothes underneath. The only adornment left appears to be the gold rings dangling from the shell in his ear, hair falling out the combed back set he keeps it in. He smells like ink and parchment and his great stinking lizard. 

Felix looks at him. Looks away. His eyes find the uneven line of trees he’s been using as target practice across the stretch of field, scorched sooty with lightning.

“Do what you want. Just don’t distract me.”

“Thanks,” Claude says, all perfectly cordial save for that twist of a smile. Felix thinks he’s hardly ever seen him without it in the moons since the hellish sprawl of Ailell. 

Claude, to Felix’s mild surprise, does not come to stand beside him. Both the Levin sword and the quiver he wears slung over his back are nowhere to be seen, and on more than a cursory glance, Felix spots the long, ghastly curve of Failnaught as it falls into the pool of fire he keeps burning for visibility. Instead, Claude scans the ground, finds what he must deem to be a comfortable patch of prickly grass, and sits down, procuring a small kit from the pocket of his shirt. Failnaught falls into his lap, four times as long as Claude is wide.

He works at the bowstring’s notch on top first, unhooking and looping the gossamer-sharp strand with care. Felix smothers the tingle of Thoron in his fingertips to watch him work, perplexed. 

“That’s squire work,” he says, not trying to hide the grumble in his voice. “You should leave it to someone else.”

“Hm?” Claude doesn’t look up, rubbing a shiny lacquer between his fingers before running them down the bowstring. “Oh, this? I’d rather do it myself.”

“Why?” Felix bites the bait. 

“I don’t know, actually. Call it peace of mind?”

“Seems a funny thing to say, for someone in your position.”

“Really?” Claude draws out the _e_ , swings low and punches into it. “How so?”

“To admit you trust only yourself with your weapons is—” Felix frowns. “It’s a statement. I’m sure you’re aware of that.”

Claude smiles, small and curled in on the edges. When he dares a glance away from his work up at Felix, his eyes are glittering. “So you really were raised as a Kingdom noble. I was beginning to have my doubts.”

“Whatever Sylvain’s said, don’t listen to him.” 

“Sylvain hasn’t told me anything.” 

Felix almost winces. _Almost_.

What he doesn’t do is redeem Claude’s unspoken question with an answer, his tongue pulling him twelve different directions at once. Felix no longer trusts himself not to be coaxed into a corner right now. He rubs flecks of lightning between the gaps in his fingers, the first building blocks of Thoron without the follow through.

In the center of the field before them, Dimitri stands at the edge of the firelight, face upturned to watch the moon. This one is closer to their days at the Academy, even if his clothes belong in the capital’s autumn chill. He hasn’t grown into his body quite yet, legs too short for his trousers, bare wrists peeking out of his too-short sleeves before palm meets glove. 

They sit in the muted sounds for a moment—the twang of Failnaught’s bowstring, the slosh of fire collapsing in on itself. Claude’s fiddling with his kit as Felix shoots the stocks of electricity upwards, bolting diagonally down to strike the line of trees in quick succession.

After a moment, Claude whistles. “You’ve gotten quite good at that.”

Felix’s lip curls. He doesn’t take his eyes off of the silhouette through the darkness as it bends down, inspecting the sticky, blossoming weeds at its feet.

“That’s not an insult,” says Claude. “Just so you know.”

“What was it supposed to be, then?”

“It’s called _positive encouragement_ , Felix.” He tilts till his chest’s almost pressed to the ground, fiddling with a thin crack running down Failnaught’s upper limb. “A certain source told me to try it out. See how it went.” 

That’s enough to push him over the edge, venom attempting to ring its way around his words. “What do you want, Claude?”

And sitting there, cross-legged at Felix’s side in nothing but his night clothes, Claude laughs. He _laughs,_ all gentle and full. Felix doesn’t know if he wants to punch him for this or not. 

“You know,” Claude says, catching his breath. “I’ve always liked that about you, Felix. Straight to the point. No titles or fancy, backhanded nobility talk. It’s refreshing.” 

“Would you rather I call you Duke Riegan?”

“By the gods, no, of course not.” 

Felix gives a _hmph_ , annoyed and huffy in spite of himself. Claude has always been a puzzle he doesn’t have the right type of mind to put together. Too many layers to peel back. Claude’s still smiling as he restrings Failnaught, the fold of his grin disappearing below another just a hair turned down at the corners, and Felix is utterly lost in trying to decipher what they both might mean. Claude tests the bow with a relaxed draw when he says:

“I guess I wanted—” Claude’s grip on the bow’s length tightens before he relaxes once more, as if the tension were never there. “I wanted to apologize.”

The bow creaks. Felix holds his breath. 

He doesn't need to guess what Claude might be referring to, not when it’s all anyone deems worthy speaking to him about—not when their whole army is an uneasy churn beneath the whispers.

“I don’t need your words. What’s done is done.”

In his periphery, Failnaught’s length lowers. Claude’s running a nail along its grip when Felix turns his chin down to look at him, watch him fret in the way he does when he believes others may not be looking.

“It’s not about the words. Not for me, anyway,” Claude says, after a beat. “I think we might not be so different in that aspect.”

Felix clenches his jaw, imagines his teeth cracking and splitting against each other. 

“The boar,” he starts. Stops. Suddenly all the names he’s ever given him splinter off his tongue, shreds until they’re nothing but a pulped, bloody mess behind his teeth. A swollen abscess left to linger too long. A wound that refuses to cauterize. 

The boar, the beast, our prince, our king. _My_ King. Mitya. Dima. 

_It._

“Dimitri,” he says instead, and sees Claude’s brow lift in the corner of his vision, “had not been himself for a very long time. There’s nothing you could’ve done.” 

The sound of Dimitri’s laughter is one he’s grown accustomed to in the past moon—but even as it rings from Felix’s side, somewhere out of sight, he only just manages to suppress the flinch that rattles his body. A beat passes before he’s able to continue.

“You cannot blame yourself for what’s out of your control.”

Claude’s silent for another moment. He huffs. “Have you ever thought about taking your own advice?”

“I have taken it,” Felix says. The words are quieter than he thought they’d be. “I learned his true nature years ago. Before anyone else did.”

“His true nature…” Claude lets the words fall. His gaze drops to Failnaught’s length as he swipes his fingers over it, the bow flickering with the beginnings of slow-given life under his rarely ungloved, calloused palm. “What was he like, then? Your Prince?”

A frigid hand wraps its fingers and wrenches around Felix’s insides.

“Our fathers were close friends. We grew up together. That’s all.”

“Hm.” Claude’s brow lifts once more in disbelief. “That’s really it?”

Felix stares down at Claude till he looks up from his ministrations on Failnaught’s grip, his expression cracking open into a smile again. “Woah! Now _that’s_ a scary face. Better not do that around Lysithea.”

“I know you’re not a fool, Claude,” Felix finds himself saying, unsure why these words are choosing to leave his mouth at this particular instant. “You know I’m not here for the Alliance. I don’t care about what happens to you or any of our former classmates. So don’t bother trying to… _console_ me. I won’t do the same for you.”

Claude’s face folds, his lips pursing. But he doesn’t look away. Felix would leave, but he was here first, and Dimitri’s still here, now a couple years younger, practicing his court script upon an invisible piece of parchment. He’s closer too, and Felix watches the balance of his palm against the air, how he keeps having to tuck his long hair behind his ears when he looks up to think, hawk quill poised so as not to drip ink.

Claude stands. His movements are silent, and Failnaught hangs loose in his grip at his side when he, too, looks up to face the moon. After a moment, he says,

“Do you think we do the right thing because it’s our best and easiest option, or because it’s what we truly _believe_ is the right thing to do?” 

Felix rubs his Reason hand against his temple, catching static. “We’re hardly treading the path of least resistance here.”

“I don’t mean it like that.” Claude rolls his shoulders—his left first, then his right.

“You couldn’t have stopped him,” Felix says again. 

“I know.” 

Felix tries not to follow Dimitri as he walks away, hands clasped at the small of his back, the moonlight casting a ring of pearly gray around his hair. Felix hasn’t been able to figure that part out yet—why it all looks so real.

“He was my friend, too, you know,” Claude says, and something next to envy or anger pricks Felix’s skin. He _hadn’t_ known. By the way Claude looks at him, it must be obvious. “And I wasn’t the only one. You’ve gotta stop acting like you’re alone in this.”

“You don’t understand,” Felix starts, hesitates, his voice tipping over into something raw, the last syllables a trembling drip of blood off his tongue. "He was—. _I_ was—"

There’s too much to say, yet none of it’ll ever be enough, and he doesn’t owe Claude—doesn't owe _anyone_ an explanation for all Dimitri could’ve been. All he subsequently wasn’t. There’s nothing that’ll repair the gaping chasm Dimitri hacked into Felix’s chest, the shape of the earth changed forever beneath a landslide. Felix hardly recognizes the scenery of his own self, anymore. The beast’d swallowed Dimitri whole, gnawed puncture wounds in everything Felix knew, plunged a clawed hand in, pulled his still-beating heart from his chest and ate that, too.

Nobody gets to know how Felix spends every night asking the same question, over and over and over again, his dreams a watercolor painting of yellowed bruises, mottled black and blue.

_Could I have saved him?_

_Could I have stopped him?_

Claude’s sigh breaks Felix back to the field, to the crickets singing in the spindled, rough patches of ferns beyond. Were they not able to hear the distant sound of armor clanking and swords ringing at their backs, the night might almost be a peaceful one.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Claude says, soft on the edges. He shrugs. “I don’t understand.”

Felix looks at him. This time, Claude doesn’t look back. 

“But it doesn’t mean you’re alone, either way. Nobody is.”

They stand like that for a handful of moments, Felix acutely aware of how each breath stirs in his chest, how Claude looks out over the fields of Adrestia with a sadness neither of them know how to name. Felix has never been good at that—the words, or the feelings. The sensation of hollowness when the coyote’s yipping echoes up through the grass.

“It was Leonie, wasn’t it?”

“Hm?” Claude hums, pretending not to have heard, no doubt. “What’s this about my dear friend and favorite mercenary captain in all Fódlan?”

“She asked you to speak to me. Right?”

“Why? Are you mad?”

Felix turns the idea over for a moment. “No.”

Claude laughs. “Is that some hesitation I detect?”

And then Felix can’t help but laugh a little too, a shaky sound, drawn out of him. He shakes his head. “No. Truly.”

Felix feels Claude watching him as he picks at the scars riddling his palms, his skin suddenly cold, shivering where the breeze trickles beneath his collar. Felix doesn’t know when he’d come so close. His eyes are like cut luminescent shells through the darkness, chipped green, bright and fathomless. Casting light over all the right angles.

“Are we done here, then?” Felix asks, suddenly itching to duck back under cover where Claude can’t dissect him beneath the shadow of the moon. Claude laughs once more, smaller this time around.

“Alright, fine. Since you caught me.” He holds up his hands in mock surrender. “I digress.”

Felix doesn’t meet his eyes as he steps around him, every bone in him aching and drained. A distant part of him hopes that Sylvain is to bed already—his arms a warm, dug-out place in the earth for him to crawl into.

“Just answer me one last thing.”

Claude’s question carries across the space between them to Felix’s back, fading with the distance. He stops, waiting. Felix doesn’t turn around when Claude finally asks,

“Do you think there’s such a thing? Resting in peace?”

The wind ripples through him. Felix imagines pressing his fingernails hard enough into his palm to draw blood. He thinks of the hunt. The boars, the way they drained the blood from their bodies in swift, sufficient slices. The way the hounds would come home, red-muzzled and panting, their tongues lolling the softest shade of black-mottled pink.

And then he thinks of his mother’s funeral, how everyone stood stiff-mouthed and silent, because that is what they had always done. How his father had held him, cupped Felix’s face to his chest, burying his tears in the breast of his coat to muffle the noise. When it came time for the rites to be given, his father set him down and stood so still it frightened him. Cold as granite, wrought as iron, even as Felix clawed at his cloak, shivering and sniffling. He did not wail—didn’t so much as let his tears fall. He knew better than to make a sound.

The earth had swallowed his mother, just as it would swallow Glenn. Just as it had now devoured Dimitri. Felix longs for a breath that isn’t clogged with dirt. 

“When people die we put them in the ground,” he says, the conviction there like a scar he can touch, a reminder. “We scatter them to the wind, or set them out to sea. In the end, it’s all the same. They are never coming back. What they wanted is irrelevant as soon as they leave this world. It’s the living that truly matter. The living are why we’re both standing here right now. They’re who we fight for.”

The silence is deafening, but the smile in Claude’s voice is transparent as his words. “Is that your long way of telling me you don’t know?”

Felix turns to glance sidelong at Dimitri’s long shadow poised against the moonlight. His face is turned up, cast in the shadow of the half-moon’s glow. Felix bites down on the unbidden lump rising in his throat. 

“The dead don’t come back,” he finishes. “Whether they rest or not doesn’t matter to me.”

☾

Three moons after Felix’s thirteenth birthday, King Lambert will embark to Duscur with his royal convoy in tow. The convoy comprises of the King’s Circle of Knights, his wife and their personal guard, and his only son. They’re going to discuss trade agreements, the best passes through the mountains for merchants, how they might proceed from here, going forward. It’s the first time there’s been such constant diplomatic communication with Duscur since the time of Loog’s children. It is a good thing. It should remain a good thing.

This is another idea Felix learnt young: happiness is not obliged to stay happy. It is easy to twist and contort, a bone ripped from its socket and shoved back in upside down. Happiness that returns from battle never returns quite the same.

The last time Felix sees the King is a few days prior, his gloved hand clasping his father’s arm with a firm shake, his smile closed but warm.

 _“All will be well, my friend.”_ The King always had a way that made the words seem bigger. _“You fret far too much.”_

It’s a simple courier in House Blaiddyd colors that brings the letter to their door. The morning air is chilled but the horse and rider are drenched in sweat. They’d ridden through the night at full pelt without cease. The letter is addressed to his father, any return name upon the envelope left empty, and the lettering of their name, _Fraldarius,_ smears at the edges, streaks and blotches of ink peppering the parchment. As if the one penning it had not the time to let the words dry.

He finds the missive years later amongst his father’s possessions, left in a drawer of the study nobody has touched since his passing. Not even his uncle had deemed it appropriate to _disturb his things_ , and despite how Felix cares for what little family he has left, his uncle too remains a man of Faerghus to the bitter end. The letter’s alone, set aside from the shuffle of more personal writings in the drawer beneath it. Felix knows what it is before he even touches the black-pitch wax Blaiddyd seal.

Felix isn’t at the estate when the letter comes. He’s out with one of the mage knights that morning, a young woman his father had taken on once Felix’d begun to show signs of magic stirring in his blood. The thunder is just beginning to crackle between the gaps in his fingers, catching little lines of static. She has him hold his breath, hold his palms out flat, and hold very still. She tells him magic is a thread one pulls made of delicate material—loop it too hastily and the whole knot unravels.

Tangles of Thunder spool atop his pale fingertips. He’s not very good at it. In their estate room, Rodrigue Fraldarius is unfolding the messy parchment, his clothes still freshly mud-splattered and damp with dew from his ride that morning. The scullery maids are busying with preparations for dinner that evening, Daphnel stew for the young lord, something sweet and spicy for the Duke when he retires for the night. Lord Glenn will return within the week and they must begin planning preparations for the roast by tomorrow. The spring hunt is set at the tail-end of the Harpstring Moon, as it has always been since before their fathers were born, and the hounds run twice a day now in readying for the occasion. 

The Thunder catches, for just a moment, into a sliver of dancing light on his thumb. It tingles and twinges but doesn’t hurt—like the slip of a thin metal needle just beneath the skin. When they turn to head home, his excitement is fit to burst out of him.

Felix would like to think he knows the moment the whole house stands still. He’d like to think he felt it in the air, the acrid scent of blood one yet unfamiliar, but recognizable all the same. He was raised for this—for the hunting, the defending, the call. In his mind’s eye of that day he stops, his gaze pulled to the west by something beyond the horizon, a shaky breath sounding a whistle only he can hear. 

But that isn’t how it happens. The only calls are that of the birds, of the hawks circling near starling nests. The world ends quietly, and Felix does not notice. 

He calls for his father, the mage knight dampening her proud smile when he gives a quick look behind him. She nods in return. An encouragement. The parlor door is closed. They have guests. His father has never minded intrusions, but Felix reins his joy in to something more presentable all the same. He cracks the door open, calling once again.

“Father?”

Felix would like to think he knows when their house stood still, but the reality is one that dawns over him a year later, on the anniversary of Glenn’s death. How it hadn’t been the letter, or his father’s face closed and crumbling in their parlor that had sent Felix’s whole being sundered to different corners of the room. It hadn’t been then, or there, that everything changed.

It had been the night before—when Felix laid in bed beneath his quilts, Dimitri laid beneath Glenn’s stilling body, his life leaking out into their travel clothes, blood seeping over blood as fire sent the earth trembling. While Felix slept in the plush darkness of dreams he no longer remembers, Dimitri reached out his hand to touch his father’s face, the severed sinew of his neck a cord of lace back to his shoulders, his corpse stiffening in the summer rain.

As Felix sets his first tentative foot into the parlor, he doesn’t realize he’s stepping onto a frozen river on the verge of spring. The water is still and black beneath his feet, an endless bend that stretches far as the eye can see. This is the path. This is the way, as they’ve known it since Felix knew how to spell his own name.

His father looks at him as if he’s a body pulled from the ice, dressed and given clothes to wear, a mouth to speak, a voice for the words. He looks, but Felix understands, suddenly, that his father doesn’t see him at all. 

Beneath him, the ice gives a precarious crack.

☾

Felix learns the final truth of Dimitri’s ghost as he falls asleep the night before they take Fort Merceus.

He’s curled up on his side, spooled in as tight and small as possible beneath the blanket. Sylvain isn’t back yet, still stuck at the war table talking logistics of their horsemen in the Fort’s narrow stone walkways with Lorenz, their tea bitter and sharp, meant for keeping the mind lively into late hours. He won’t be to bed before dawn. 

Felix had run himself ragged to slake his nerves down to something livable, something he can breathe around properly. It doesn’t matter how many battles they survive and endure—his adrenaline’s always started running fast and early, ever since he was sent out to quell a poor man’s rebellion all those years ago. Most nights he’ll drift in that wavering line between sleep and consciousness, dreams just half-formed ideas melting behind his eyes as soon as he goes to touch them.

His sleep had improved since Sylvain invited himself into his bed. It would regress again once he was gone. Felix tries not to think on the reason why. 

It’s one of those nights, though, and there isn’t much use pretending it isn’t. Felix focuses on the movement of his stomach as he breathes under his balled up hands, a technique Glenn had taught him once, when the sight and scent of blood used to send him gagging and shaking onto his knees. Oftentimes it is enough to steady the thrum of his heart down, steady enough to sleep for a handful of hours.

 _One._ Breathe in. _Two, three, four._ Breathe out. Slow. _Five._ Breathe in.

The dream he drifts into, as they almost always are, is a collection of unorganized paintings, messy and scrawled, as if in the hand of a child. It brings to mind how Dimitri, almost seven, had sat in the grass at the dinner table today, pulling up dandelions and blowing them over Felix’s boots. It fades quickly, replaced with a smear of blue, a cloak furred and secure as it’s thrown over his shoulders. Something soft, akin to a kiss, pressed to the crown of his head, and the sound of the clock tower chiming the hour a few rooms away. 

He’s aware, vaguely, of movement near the tent flap, the sound of may-be footsteps. Had it been so long, already? Was the hour so late? Felix shifts deeper into the blankets, waiting for Sylvain’s bulk to fall at his back.

There’s a clunk, something heavy hitting the packed down earth, and then nothing. The air goes cold, and all is silent, an absolute stillness that quiets even the crickets in their song. In a sudden lurch of pure animal instinct, every inch of Felix stands up on end. 

_That’s not Sylvain._

Felix opens his eyes as a breath rasps, rattling in the corner of the tent.

A shiver races from his toes to the top of his spine. His breath comes in rapid, shifting puffs of smoke as the chill seeps beneath the blanket like a wetness, like an icy wind. The rasping comes again, only this time it catches, chokes. Something hits the ground, bounces twice before going still. 

Holding his breath, Felix inches his hand beneath the pillow, feeling for the dagger’s hilt somewhere buried in the recesses of fabric. It is smooth and dull and unremarkable—it will do little to defend him, but Felix has always been good at making his blade strike where it matters most. 

If it is a spy, they’ve done a poor job of concealing their presence. If it were an animal, or an assassin, Felix would already be dead. Ruling out both of those possibilities does little to calm the thunder pounding inside him, his heartbeat sounding all the way down to the soles of his feet. Whatever it is, he knows it’s somewhere near the entrance.

His sword is just beyond the length of blanket on Sylvain’s side of their sleep rolls. If he moves quick enough, he should be able to reach it before the enemy has time to strike him down. As long as Felix has his blade, there will be no competition. He keeps his gaze locked on the pale skin of his wrist disappearing beneath the pillow, waiting, clenching down on his jaw to keep his teeth from clattering.

Another growl of a breath, unmistakably louder. Unmistakably closer. He doesn’t have much time.

That is when the a clink comes, like armor plates moving together, the drawing of a weapon. What he does next goes against all better judgement, any ounce of common sense he has left screaming at him _don’t look, don’t look, don’t let it see you,_ and the sensation rising in him isn’t unlike feeling caught in the eyes of a thing out for blood.

Felix whips his head to the sound and slides the dagger blade from its scabbard in a single, swift motion, swinging it in a wide arch as he jolts upright, grabbing the sheath with his other hand to hold a poor replacement of what otherwise might be a shield. He pushes backwards and up onto the balls of his feet, scampering away to get as close to the other side of the tent as he can, eyes scrounging through the murky evening air to catch a glimpse of his assailant. 

The shadow in the darkness is unmistakable, a hulking outline that swallows the night around it, crowds Felix’s view of anything else. From where he’s crouched Felix catches the flinty glint of black steel through the torches burning dim beyond the tent’s canvas, their light illuminating the ripped and tattered outline of a cloak long enough to brush the ground.

Felix gathers himself up and lunges. He swipes once, twice, but the blade meets nothing but air. The figure ambles back a step, another breath wrenching from its chest with a rough gasp. Felix slinks back again, preparing for a counterattack that does not come. The shadow goes still, the movement it does make as it stumbles backwards sluggish and unsteady. The bloodlust Felix’d felt before fades to nothing, as if a mere figment of his imagination.

When it runs out of room the shadow falls to its knees, as if in surrender. He tries to recall if his strikes had connected, but the chill in the air sends his skin crawling once again. Felix watches the blade shake in his hands as it levels with what must be the creature’s head.

“Who are you?” Felix growls. He spits at the ground near its feet and lets the words seep into the silence. “Speak, before I let my blade feast on your blood.”

The silence is so deep it appears endless. Felix could dive down until the light had long since disappeared and he’d never scrape the bottom.

“ _For_ …” The pale outline wheezes, head lolling. “… _give.”_

Felix shudders, drawing further up the tangle of blankets. The air is thick and cottony when he tries to breathe. Through the darkness, the hunch of the creature’s back sways. 

“ _Forgive…me."_

It lifts its head, mop of what might’ve once been golden hair falling all over its face like a veil. The lone gap in its shroud reveals a singular pale and piercing eye, rimmed in spindling branches of blood. It meets Felix’s through the darkness as a splatter of pitch-black blood dribbles from the hole in its throat and collects, like little tears on Sylvain’s blanket.

“ _Forgive…me_. Forgive me.”

Felix has brushed death before: with the back of his knuckles, with the tips of his fingers. There’ve been many close calls, some of them closer than others. Felix has had lances in his belly, arrows buried in the meat of his thighs, poison-dipped knives swung near his neck. Yet none of them—not a single one—compares to how it feels when the next word is ripped out of his mouth through his teeth, a whisper gritted down to nothing but air when he shivers.

“…Dimitri?”

**Author's Note:**

> if you'd like to keep up with when part two will be posted, i'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/snipmoonn) :)
> 
> also if you made it here: congratulations. i will now send you a box of cookies for your trouble. any kind you want just let me know.


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